The young man showed us a letter from his brother, Pablo “Pepe” Ortega. It was postmarked Detroit, in January. Pepe Ortega brags to his family about how he has become the manager of Krispee Chips. He is making so much money, soon he will be a millionaire.
The brother tells us that Pepe went to Europe about four years ago. The family, which apparently is middle class, living in Mexico City, heard little from him, but he had written that he was learning to be a chef, in Paris. Then he was in Italy. Then they got this letter. They wouldn't have become worried, but then they got another letter, ostensibly from a concerned friend of Pepe's. The brother did not have the letter, alas. His mother had thrown it away. She thought it was obviously from some girl Pepe had gotten pregnant. It was mailed from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, but no address, no name. Just a message that Pepe's family should contact Mr. DiEbola about the whereabouts of their son. It was important, the letter said.
“Was this letter in English?” I asked.
Mr. Ortega, a very handsome, well-dressed man of thirty, indicated that it had been. When he'd learned of it, his mother—who could read and speak English “un poco"—had already destroyed it. She didn't take it seriously, but he wrote to Krispee Chips and received a letter from them. He showed me. It was from a Chris Oresti, designated as office manager. Ms. Oresti wrote that Mr. Ortega had resigned his position of production adviser at Krispee Chips in January, not long after his letter to his family. They had no idea where he had gone, but he was thought to have left Detroit.
This really was too good an opportunity to pass up. With Mr. Ortega and a taciturn detective named Field, I drove to Krispee Chips, which is located down an extraordinarily long block on an otherwise residential street that runs off the river.
Chris Oresti was new to me. She was an attractive and intelligent-looking woman in her late thirties, perhaps early forties. I appreciate people like her. They're bright, competent, and pleasant. Very understanding and quick to anticipate difficulties and head them off. She grasped our purpose quickly.
“Mr. Ortega was a valued employee,” she told me. “Mr. DiEbola thought very highly of him and was distressed when he learned that Mr. Ortega had quit and left, without any warning.” She said that Ortega had simply called one morning, instead of appearing for work, and said he was leaving town. He didn't say where he was going, but mentioned that he would contact them later about his pay.
“But he didn't contact you,” I said.
“No,” Ms. Oresti said. She went on to tell us that Ortega may have exaggerated his role at Krispee Chips. He was nominally carried as a production adviser, but that was more of a ceremonial title that Mr. DiEbola had created for him. He was apparently developing a new line of taco chips, without so many additives. He came and went as he pleased; in fact, you could hardly call his activities at the factory regular employment. Mostly, he worked at DiEbola's house. She thought that, in fact, he had been Mr. DiEbola's personal chef, but she wasn't sure. She wasn't privy to that kind of knowledge of Mr. DiEbola's private life.
Alas, Mr. DiEbola wasn't in. She wasn't even sure if he was in the country. She would certainly take our message asking him to call. She knew it was important.
That was disappointing. But it wasn't as if there wasn't plenty to do. Shootings, robberies, rapes . . . business was brisk. When Field and I got back to the precinct Detective Ayeh asked my advice about a case that was already three months old. If you didn't get something going within a week or two, a case tended to disappear, buried under the eternal blizzard of new offenses, new outrages. But this case interested me, as it had all of us at the time.
A woman had gone into a supermarket, around nine P.M., and pulled a gun, attempting a robbery. Three customers had responded by pulling their own guns, and all of them shot at the would-be robber, at least one of them killing her. Pretty amazing, even for Detroit. It made the national news, for the usual fifteen minutes, or seconds. And it was later noted by a few more serious editorialists.
Inevitably, the incident was seen as symptomatic of a gun-obsessed society.
For the investigators it was more interesting that one of the other pistol-packing customers happened to be a woman who knew the dead woman or, more germanely, knew the robber's husband. Knew him all too well, it turned out. This was a coup for one of the precinct detectives, young Ayeh, he of the keen eye and hawk nose and better known as Ahab. But, alas, the business came to nothing, since the bullet that killed the woman turned out to have come from the gun of one of the other customers, a man who had no relationship of any kind with the victim. Indeed, it was difficult to prove that the woman who knew the husband had even fired her piece.
Like everything else, all the information about this case was on a computer file. I'm not tremendously handy at this, but even a cursory scan through turned up at least one interesting fact: the supermarket was way the hell and gone over on Eight Mile Road, a couple of precincts away from where the victim lived. Ayeh said that he had noticed that and he had ascertained that Mrs. McDonough, the victim, had gone to the store separately from Miss James (the once suspected killer.) Both their cars had been parked in the store parking lot. The husband, Ted McDonough, had been home asleep (he worked the night shift at FedEx, at the airport). Ayeh had also ascertained that Mrs. McDonough was pushing a grocery cart that contained breakfast cereal, a half gallon of milk, toilet paper, shampoo, a plastic container of chocolate-chip cookies from the store bakery, and a half gallon of chocolate swirl low-fat frozen yogurt. She had not paid for these items when the shooting broke out, although the cashier had rung them up, which was how Ayeh knew exactly what was in the cart—it was on the scanner printout receipt.
I hadn't known any of these details. They seemed very intriguing. I agreed with Ayeh that if Mrs. McDonough wanted to rob a grocery store she wasn't likely to do it in her own neighborhood, where she was well known. But would she actually buy things she needed? Frozen yogurt? If your purpose was robbery, why bother with these items?
And sure, if Miss James wanted to kill her lover's wife she might have followed her to the store, or she might even have been tipped off that Mrs. McDonough was going to attempt such a thing, perhaps by the husband. Though it seemed a bit too convenient that Mrs. McDonough's gun was unloaded—she actually fired no shots herself. But was this the whole story? Could it possibly be the whole story?
“Where did Mrs. McDonough's gun come from?” I asked Ayeh.
It seems she had bought it herself, a month earlier. A legitimate purchase, over the counter, from a legitimate dealer. It was registered, although she was not licensed to carry it on her person. It could be transported in the trunk of a car, from the police station where it was registered to her home, and to and from her home to an approved firing range or gun club. Mrs. McDonough didn't belong to any gun club.
The fact that Miss James had not, in fact, killed her rival had stymied the investigation. But I wondered if it couldn't be jump-started again. For one thing, it certainly looked like Mrs. McDonough—"What was her first name?” I asked Ayeh. “Mildred,” he answered—had actually shopped for groceries and was planning to pay for them: she had more than enough money in her purse. I asked Ayeh to find out, if he could, whether that grocery list corresponded to needs or preferences in the household: i.e., did they usually buy Honey Bunches of Oats and Swan's Neck toilet paper? Were they out of or low on those items? Did someone in the house like chocolate-chip cookies and/or low fat chocolate swirl frozen yogurt? In short, were these usual, regular purchases?
The other thing was, could there be any normal or reasonable excuse or cause for Miss Ardella James to be in that neighborhood at 9:08 P.M.? For this Ayeh had a reply. Yes, Ardella James had been at a record store on Eight Mile Road, which had obtained an old blues recording for her. She was a fan of Etta James, who she liked to tell people was a cousin, although there was no evidence that they were related. Ardella was a blues collector, in fact. The record shop had previously obtained unusual or hard-t
o-find records for her. She didn't like CDs. She liked vinyl. “She says it has a better sound,” Ayeh told me. “The surface noise is a problem, especially on older records, she says, but the recording is fuller or something. It didn't make sense to me. She picked up the record—paid twenty-five dollars for it!—some time between eight-twenty and eight-forty. The store closed at nine. Then she showed up at the Food Fair at nine. She hadn't done any shopping there. She apparently had just come into the store.”
And no one else, none of the other people present, could be linked to either Ardella or Mildred. The man who actually shot her, whose bullet had killed Mildred, was Albert P. Fessel, age sixty-six, a retired baker. He lived in the neighborhood, was married, in good repute, and had a permit to carry the .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. He used to own a bakery on Chene Street, about a mile away, but had given it up when he was robbed for about the twentieth time.
I remembered the bakery. I remembered the man, I thought. He made wonderful raised donuts, incredibly delicious and appallingly fattening. I suppose I had eaten several hundred of them in my lifetime. Could this be the same guy? Ayeh assured me that Al Fessel was indeed a lightly colored African-American of about five feet and eight inches in height, weighing about two hundred and thirty or forty pounds, with a neatly trimmed mustache and sparse, gray hair cut very close to his round skull. He wore heavy black-rimmed glasses. No known or even suspected relationship with the deceased.
Al Fessel claimed that he thought the woman was going to kill him. She had a gun in her hand and she shot at him at least twice, he was certain, at the time. At the time. Later, he supposed that he must have been mistaken, since the checkout clerk said that
Mrs. McDonough had only waved the gun and hadn't fired it. But somebody had fired, and Al Fessel had thought it was her. “Must of been someone else, then,” he'd told Ayeh. “And he knew,” Ayeh said, “'cause he'd been shot at plenty.”
All this was interesting, certainly, but I thought something was amiss. I wondered if there wasn't a fundamental misstep here. How did we know, for instance, that Mildred McDonough had been intending a robbery? I kept returning to the fact that she'd had more than enough money in her purse to pay for her groceries. The more I thought about it, the less Mildred looked like a would-be robber. I discussed it with Ayeh and he agreed to go back and talk to the clerk. Though where it would get us, I didn't know.
In the afternoon Mr. Luckle called back. (His name was Luckle—it was often misspelled and mispronounced, he said. I could commiserate, having been called Millhowzen, Mulhouser, Millhozer, Mullice, and even Malice.) He said he had important business with me and he hoped that I could come down to headquarters, to Internal Investigations, “So that we can clear this matter up,” he said. “Would four o'clock be convenient?”
It was neatly performed, but I was familiar with this dance routine, having used it myself many times. Obviously, something was vermischt, to use an old NATO term (which I think must have meant, once, “screwed up, messed up, perhaps missing"). Four o'clock wasn't at all convenient but I motored on downtown compliantly.
Mr. Luckle was one of those truly white men, apparently quite hairless, who seemed devoid of blood. You couldn't really imagine him bruised. Where would the bruise blood come from? But to give this ghostly pale man credit, he seemed pleasant enough and he also wasn't noticeably on the prod, as most cops fear when dealing with Internal Investigations. He seemed as puzzled as anyone about the funds that Grootka had presumably misappropriated. They amounted to $4,017.39—enough to be concerned about but not enough to fuel a scandal, considering that the figure encompassed more than thirty years of detective work. Still, it couldn't be ignored. Mr. Luckle wasn't the kind of guy who ignored any misdeed.
I was willing to help, though hardly eager to devote my time to a painstaking search for legitimate payouts by Grootka, especially since the man was safely dead and anyway his reputation had never exactly been honorable. But Luckle changed my mind.
“Your name is on several of the chits,” he said.
These “chits” were mere slips of paper on which Grootka had scribbled a sum—anywhere from five dollars to fifty dollars, never any more—and a name, plus a signature (usually his own, but sometimes “Mul,” or “Mullein,” or something not really recognizable, but which Luckle seemed to believe was an approximation of my name). I had not signed any of these chits. I was willing to swear it. The names were those of informants, or so it appeared: Shakespeare, Red Hen, the Sparrow, Homer, Pudokyo (I remembered him: a sex pervert whose penis got longer every time he lied), Motor Mouth, Caruso (and Mario Lanza), Dickbreath, 33 1/3 (a.k.a. ElPee, a notorious ear bender), the Turdle, Books. Many of them were familiar to me, although I reckoned that most of them were dead. I couldn't recall seeing any of them lately. Books was very dear, in more ways than one: a good old friend both of Grootka's and later, mine, and also the recipient of several hundred dollars. Luckle believed that there was more missing, since the chits accounted for only a portion of what the department had actually appropriated for this purpose. But at least this much was nominally accounted for.
I didn't see what the big deal was. Mr. Luckle readily explained.
“These chits are in no way adequate accounting for departmental expenditures. Since their originator is no longer available for clarification and/or restitution, his associate—you, Sergeant Mulheisen—will be held accountable for any funds you are unable to justify.”
That was pretty clear. Unless I could explain a bunch of barely legible scraps of paper, the department was going to make me pay up. I gave Mr. Luckle my most vulpine grimace, but it didn't seem to faze him. Armed punks have cowered in corners before that grimace. Luckle didn't blink and, to be sure, no blood rose to his cheeks. It was a lot of malarkey, of course, and the Policemen's Benevolent Association wouldn't stand for it, but it looked like a hassle. I said I'd give it my best shot.
Since I was at headquarters I went by Records with an idea that I'd look into Grootka's cases, make a list of his informants, and justify it that way. It didn't work. For one thing, most of Grootka's cases were precomputer, and while some of that stuff has been logged onto computer tape, or whatever they do, a lot of it hasn't and never will be. It's just too expensive and nowadays the government is so strapped for operating funds that we can't be spending it on things that don't show an immediate payoff. These files were, in fact, more neglected now than they would have been had computers never been invented. It's a long story and a boring one, about the unanticipated drawbacks of a major technological transition, so you won't hear it here. The upshot was that if I found it so important to ransack Grootka's files I'd have to do it myself, and be prepared to spend a few dusty days in dark caverns.
But then, of course, there was Ms. Agge Allyson. She might be interested in spelunking Grootka's dark past. Hell, it was her vocation, so to speak. When we met tomorrow I'd suggest it.
Records had actually packed up many of these records and were storing them in an old warehouse down by the river. I recognized the address. It wasn't very far from where Grootka had once found a corpse and called me in to help investigate. He'd identified the corpse as Books Meldrim, one of his “music students,” as it were. It seemed ludicrously appropriate that the body of Grootka's work, so to speak, was now immured in an adjacent warehouse.
4
Dining with the Dead
After Grootka's death I'd searched his apartment thoroughly. It was a nice apartment, a ground-floor back in an old town house, a style of building that had been constructed in Detroit in the twenties and thirties to house upscale management types in the auto industry. They were typically three stories (any higher and the code required an elevator) and built within walking distance of major trolley lines. They were usually solid brick with a fairly grand foyer that featured marble walls, terrazzo tile, and an ornate central staircase that led to a gallery on the next floor, which connected more humbly by a narrower staircase to the third floor. So th
e third floor often featured more actual floor space than the two lower stories, because there was no great yawning open stairwell.
Grootka's building was a couple of blocks from the Detroit River, out Jefferson Avenue east of the Belle Isle Bridge. His main-floor apartment was spacious, with a large living room, a couple of bedrooms, a large kitchen and bath, even a good-sized pantry. In the original layout, his part of the building would have been the kitchen and living quarters of the servants, the front rooms being reserved for the gentry. That was where the rabbi had lived and his widow still resided. Grootka kept his quarters very well, although I suspect that Mrs. Newman, the rabbi's widow, actually cleaned the place for him.
The bedroom that he slept in was dark, the only window opening onto the central airshaft. Grootka used to tell me that he liked its darkness, that he had difficulty sleeping with any kind of light. “Anything comes for me in the night, it better come with a flashlight, and ghosts don't carry flashlights.”
The room was furnished military style: a simple iron bed frame with a thin stuffed mattress lying on a lattice of flat metal strips fastened by springs to the frame. I had slept on a bed just like this in the air force; we called it a rack. In fact, Grootka's rack could have stood up to inspection in any barracks I'd ever lived in. The two blankets were rough gray wool, evidently from a military surplus store. He made the bed in a military way, too, with the blankets tucked under the mattress, hospital corners, and one of the blankets stretched tautly over the pillow as a dust cover, rather than under it in the white-collar inspection style. To my knowledge, Grootka had never been in the military, so this style may have reflected some orphanage-inculcated habitude. Perhaps the desire for utter darkness stemmed from this experience as well.
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