Man with an Axe

by Jon A. Jackson

  We laughed at that, but Hoffa was serious, I see that now. He says, “No, I mean, just as a sample, who'd you kick? I mean if you was me?”

  And I says, “Just as a sample? Well, you could kick Carmine. That'd be a big enough sample for anybody. But, if it was me? I'd kick the Fat Man, DiEbola. He's the real brains there. Carmine wouldn't know what to do without the Fat Man, so it's almost like kicking both of ‘em. The eastern Mob would be in here running things before you know it. There'd be a lot of hell to pay and some more people would prob'ly get whacked before it was over, but they sure as hell would be out of your damn union.”

  I could see that Hoffa liked that idea. He thinks for a while and we go on to some other stuff, but he comes back after a bit and says, “If the Fat Man got kicked, just as a sample, who do you think could do it?”

  He was looking at me kind of close and I knew what he was thinking, so I says, “Don't be looking at me, Jim. I got nothing against dropping a fat turd like DiEbola, but if I did it I'd do it for my own self, not for you or nobody else.”

  “Well, who?” he asks. “Do you know anybody?”

  “You're the tough guy,” I tell him. “You do it. You've dropped the hammer on a man before.”

  “Where'd you hear that?” he snaps.

  I shrug. Now that I thought about it, I guess I never heard that about Hoffa, hisself, but I says, “Well, that's what they say about the Teamsters. Not so much bustin’ a cap on some guy, but I heard you guys were never shy about breakin’ heads. I heard you wasn't too worried about scratchin’ up your knuckles, yourself.” Hoffa smiles, a little half-smile. He liked that tough-guy shit. “Take a hurt and give a hurt, eh?” I go on. “That's the way you bruisers are. You gotta know somebody.”

  He thinks about that for a minute, then he says, “Do you think if we contacted Carmine, he'd meet?”

  I could see what he was thinking, so I says, “You don't wanta ask him out here again. These folks here got enough problems without bringing the Mob down on them. They come out here once, on their own, but I'd say they was desperate, then. If they come back, they'll bring a goddamn army with them. You wanta talk to Carmine, set up a meet? Go ahead"—I point to the telephone—"call him. But I'd go for something a little more remote, where there wasn't so many innocent people around. Like maybe the Mo-fuckin'-hobby Desert.”

  “I know a place upstate,” he says, “a hunting cabin. It ain't exactly remote. You can drive to it, but it's out in the woods and this time of the year there ain't no hunters or nothing around. Nearest neighbor is, I don't know, couple miles. It ain't my place, it belongs to somebody else. Maybe that would be a good place to meet.”

  I tried to talk him out of it. We had a pretty good plan, I thought, with him going to the TV station in Pontiac. No calls ahead, so nobody could set up an ambush, or nothing, just jump in the cars and drive to the TV station and let everybody see that Jimmy Hoffa was alive and kicking and then he'd have to talk to the F.B.I., who would obviously protect him. Why screw around?

  Later, when things settled down, he could talk to Carmine, explain the situation, and as far as I was concerned, if he wanted to pop Carmine or the Fat Man then, well, he was welcome to it. But right now . . .

  No, no, he was like a kid who gets hold of an idea and he wants to get on with it, right now! The man is hot. He's still pissed because they sent the mugs to deal with him and he still half-ass thought that it was s'posed to be a hit. “You don't know these guys like I do,” he says. “They commit theirselves to a plan, an action, and they carry it out. It's their code. They know the Street and the Street respects ‘em ‘cause they know the Mob always does what they say they'll do. That's why they come out here.”

  I blew my stack. “Fuck their code! I heard that shit all my life and I never bought it. Sure, some lamebrains think that way, but mainly the Mob is like any other business, except that it has to rely on too many fuckin’ blood relatives, ‘cause they can't trust nobody, and that's how they're always fuckin’ up and why they don't actually run shit. Hell, if you're hard enough to shoot people you can run the whole shitaree, but these assholes, they're mostly too dumb to read plain English, much less a fucking code.” I hadda calm down.

  “Sure, they're dangerous,” I concede the point. “But they're fuckin’ businessmen first. If it don't pay, they don't play. So don't think that some fucking code drove Carmine and the Fat Man out here. They're fuckin’ scared that the Feds are gonna come down on their ass, that someone seen those two fucks diddling with you in the parking lot, and until they know you're fuckin’ takin’ the dirt nap, they're gonna be lookin’ for you. Those bastards had some information and they decided to take a ride and check it out. If you was here, like they expected, they prob'ly woulda tried to parley. But you wasn't here, as far as they knew. They're suspicious bastards, though, so they sent Cooze back. And you see what happened.”

  “Get your head outta your ass,” Hoffa says. “If I go back and try to pretend like nothing happened it'll just happen all over again. Nothing is settled. I see now, what I gotta do is hash this out with Carmine and Tony Jack and the Fat Man. Then I can make my public appearance, but we'll have all this behind us and everything will be copacetic.”

  I had an idea. “What's those two kids’ names, the ones who came to see you at the restaurant?” I picked up the phone and called Rackets and Conspiracy. “Andy? Hey, I'm looking for some guys, maybe you heard of ‘em, Angelo Rinaldi, something like that, and . . . Oh,” I says, giving Hoffa the full benefit of my show. “And who was with him? Nicholas Soteri? Mmmm. No, I don't think that's it. Hey, Andy, would I shit you? It ain't them. My guys wouldn't be takin’ no nap in the trunk of the same old Plymouth. Yah, yah, same to you.” I look at Hoffa. “Seems like Angelo and Nick decided to buddy up in the trunk of an ayban.”

  “Ayban?” Hoffa was a little dense—maybe it was shock.

  “Abandoned auto,” I says. “Carmine and the Fat Man are tidying up the mess. They got rid of the fools. Now all you got to do is come out like the sun and say everything is all right.”

  “And end up in an ayban,” he says.

  Well, I could see he wasn't gonna listen to sense. What he couldn't see was that if he was hell bent on hashing things out, the only hash was maybe gonna be his ass. But I could see he wasn't goin’ to no TV station without he talked to Carmine first. I had a bad feeling, Mul. It seemed like we was so close. I just felt like if he'd gone to the TV station like we planned at first, things could of worked out. But he wouldn't have it that way. So I said, Okay, I'd see if I couldn't set something up.

  One thing I knew for sure, I couldn't be dealing with Carmine and Fats myself. I know you think I'm some kind of outlaw, Mul, but I ain't that dumb. Hell, I already had to deal with Cooze and it didn't go too well. But it was something I had to deal with and I did it. A situation come up, Cooze went down. Two and two is four. But this was a whole ‘nother ball game. I couldn't be out front on this, no way.

  It had to be Lonzo. He didn't like it, natch, but I showed him how it had to be. Hell, he was already in it up to his ears. It was his own fault. Lonzo swore up and down that it wasn't so, that he hadn't brought in the Mob, but he had the contacts, they knew him, he was the logical guy. No matter how it boiled down, the Mob'd blame the spade anyways. If things turned out okay for the Mob, he'd be cool. I explained that his best chance for it to turn out right was to be up front with them, play the simpleminded messenger boy.

  The place Hoffa had in mind was up near Cadillac, about three hours’ drive. It belonged to a mug named Cess Morgan, who collected for the numbers for Big Sid, until he got sent up for busting some guy's nose who tried to screw him. You remember Big Sid, Mul. Sid is kind of on the outs with the Mob, lately, but I hear he is getting back in business. Well, anyway, this Cess is a hunter, or used to be. Right now he was in Jacktown for a couple of years. But Hoffa used to know him, ‘cause Cess drove a truck for a while and was in the union and he used to do some strong-arm stuff for the
boys. Hoffa thought of him when I said he must know somebody who would do the job. Cess is on the shelf, but Hoffa knows where he hides the key to his cabin, and it sounds about perfect for the job.

  Well, here I am, another book damn near all scribbled up. You know I was looking back over it and it don't read too bad. But I'm kinda sad about the way Tyrone looks here. I don't wanta give the wrong impression, Mul. Tyrone is a really good guy. He was under a lotta pressure and the situation at Lonzo's didn't bring out the best in him. You got to understand that a kid like Tyrone is a artist. He lives for his art. He ain't like you and me and the rest of these birds. He'd do just about anything to see his music played and heard. But he's basically a good, kind kid, don't smoke, don't hardly drink except a beer now and then, and never did no dope that I could see, ‘though he must of experimented now and then, like a kid would do.

  You could see what kind of kid he was from the way other people acted around him. Even older folks, like Jacobsen, and hard sunzabitches like Lonzo, they treated Tyrone with respect and love. I ain't shitting you, Mul. I wrote “love” there. And of course Vera, she was crazy about his ass. And it wasn't the sex, I don't think. It was the genius. In a lot of ways he was a kind of innocent kid, just sailing along through life with his eyes wide open but not looking at what you and me would see. He saw something else and it was pretty beautiful.

  Well, enough of this shit. See you in book five. Ask Vera.

  10

  Jimmy Jam

  “Why do you say Hoffa's in Brazil?” I asked Vera. “Do you mean he's still alive in Brazil?”

  “I don't think he's alive,” Vera said. “That was more or less a joke.”

  “A joke?”

  “A Hoffa joke,” she said. “See, Hoffa was born in Brazil. That's Brazil, Indiana. He told me that. We were talking one day and he told me like it was a joke. ‘Maybe I should run away to Brazil,’ he said. ‘You know, like them bank robbers and embezzlers do. Only I already been there. In fact, I'm from Brazil.’”

  She laughed, not an out-loud laugh, but kind of fondly. “He told me all about Brazil, what he could remember. The big joke was that the town doctor, this hick town G.P., had got it into his head that Jimmy's mom wasn't pregnant with him, she just had this tumor. You know how doctors are: they make a diagnosis and you can't get ‘em to change it, no matter what. And, of course, the Hoffas were very worried about it, about this tumor. You know, Is it malignant? Am I going to die? How long do I have, Doctor? She'd already had a couple of kids, so she wasn't some naive little teenager. But then, on Valentine's Day she goes into labor and little

  Jimmy pops out! Nothing to it! I wonder what the doctor said when he saw the kid.” She laughed.

  “Hoffa told you this? So you must have had some time to talk.”

  “A lot of time,” she said. “Quiet afternoons at Turtle Lake. But Jimmy was funny about it. He said when he was a kid they used to call him ‘Tumor.’ I liked him, quite a bit.”

  “So he's not in Brazil,” I said.

  She looked at me and shook her head, as if despairing, thinking, Cops. “Jimmy used to call me Alma. It was a name that Tyrone had made up, when we first ran into him, a kind of alias. And Tyrone was supposed to be Taylor. Well, after a little while at the lake, that was blown, but Jimmy still called me Alma.”

  “So where's Hoffa?” I asked, the implacable cop.

  “I think Jimmy Hoffa is wherever we want him to be,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I guess you're kind of literary, or you read a lot, anyway,” she said. “That's what Grootka told me, which is why I pulled that Dickens stunt, but have you read much of Graham Greene?”

  I said I had. I liked Greene.

  “Good. Maybe you can tell me what book it is where he's talking about how real live characters, people, who when they die they become like fiction. All right, I didn't say that right.” She thought for a minute, then started again, hunching forward on her Japanese couch thing, very intent.

  “The person Greene used as an example was Winston Churchill, who was an actual person, right? But after he died he became like a fictional person, like . . . yeah, Don Quixote. That's the example Greene used. Now even I remember that Quixote is famous for not telling the difference between reality and fiction. Real people, if they are remembered at all after they die, become basically fictional, or at least, not a hell of a lot different from fictional characters.”

  I nodded. “And . . . ?”

  “Well, that's the way it is with Jimmy Hoffa,” she said. “He was a real live person, sure, but he soon became a fictional person that we all know, ‘Jimmy Hoffa.’” She held up her two hands, framing her head, and flexed her forefingers to indicate quotation marks. “TV comedians still tell jokes about Hoffa, twenty years later, but it's really ‘Jimmy Hoffa.’”

  “So what's your point?” I asked, obstinately dense.

  “The point is,” she sighed, “the real Jimmy Hoffa and ‘Jimmy Hoffa'"—she gestured again—"are one and the same now. Now that the real Jimmy Hoffa doesn't exist. He has no more validity than the fictional one.”

  “What an interesting notion,” I said, dryly. “But I'm not interested in"—I made the gesture—'"Jimmy Hoffa.’ You knew the real Jimmy Hoffa. When did you see him last?”

  She was surprisingly crisp: “It was on August 8, 1975, about eleven P.M. He got in a car with Janney Jacobsen and Lonzo and drove away.”

  “What about Grootka? Where was he?”

  “He and Tyrone left at the same time, in Grootka's car.”

  “So they left you behind, at Lonzo Butterfield's house, at the resort?” She nodded. “Did you know where they were going when they left there?”

  “Yeah, they were going up north somewhere. Cadillac, I think. I don't know the actual place.”

  “What do you think happened up there? What have you been told?”

  “I don't know what happened. That's the part Grootka would never tell me.”

  “But what about your husband, Tyrone?”

  “I never saw Tyrone again.”

  I was stunned. I didn't know what to say. I'd been anticipating meeting Tyrone Addison. I hadn't given it much thought, because it was not imminent, I felt. And anyway, it's not my way: I try not to anticipate too much. But now, what? I felt confused. My mind was suddenly flooded with a million questions, too many to bother with just one, but you have to start with a single step, as I'm sure Books would have told me.

  “You never saw Tyrone again? What about the others? Jacobsen?”

  Vera stood up and walked across the room. She was a lithe woman, graceful, in excellent physical shape. She cupped one elbow and gazed out the window. “I saw Grootka, several times. But not Janney,” she said.

  “But . . . didn't you marry him? Aren't you Vera Jacobsen, his wife?”

  “I was his wife. Now I am his widow, his relict. Makes me sound as if I still belong to him, doesn't it?” She made a huffing sound that might have been amusement. “If anything, he belongs to me. I have everything he ever had, his name, his money, plus his memory. . . . I'm all that remains of Janney, you might say. I married Janney long before I started living with Tyrone and became his true wife, but I never divorced Janney,” she said, turning to look at me. “I'm not sure if Grootka knew that, at least not at first. I guess from your expression that if he did know, he didn't tell you.”

  “I'm just taking a wild guess here,” I said, “but from Agge Allyson's appearance, whether you were married to her father or not, she is Tyrone Addison's child.”

  Vera had turned back to the window, peering down the block. “Still there,” she reported. Then she faced me again. “Would you like a cigarette? I smoke ten a day. It's time for number five, already. I may exceed my limit today.”

  She took a cigarette from a pack on a nearby shelf. She lit it and blew out the smoke. She smiled. “Wrong again, bright boy. About Agge, that is. I wonder if Grootka really knew you very well. Agge isn't Ty's dau
ghter. I had her a couple of years earlier. It was what first caused the split between me and Janney. Agge's dad—and she knows this—is Albert Ayler.”

  “You're kidding. Another genius.”

  “Yeah. I liked fucking geniuses. Genii.”

  She perched on the high bar stool and said, “Dead black genii.”

  “So, Tyrone is dead.”

  She clapped her hands in approval, but then the ashes from her cigarette fell and she busied herself putting it out and cleaning it up. Finally, she said, “Well, he's legally dead anyway, not having been heard from for twenty years.”

  “And Jacobsen? Also dead, then?” When she nodded, I said, “Legally?”

  “Yes. A lot of people disappeared in 1975, you know. It was getting like Chile around here. Did you know, one hundred and seventy-six thousand people disappeared in the U.S. that year? Went missing, as the Brits say—I like that phrase. Went missing. I looked it up, the statistic. Heck, thirteen hundred and forty-five disappeared in Michigan!”

  “It sounds like a lot,” I said. “Did you really look it up?”

  “No. I made that up. I wonder how close it is, though.”

  “So,” I said, “Tyrone Addison, Janney Jacobsen—what was his real name, by the way?—and Jimmy Hoffa all disappeared from your view and, I guess, anybody else's, on August 8, 1975?”

  “That's right. And many other thousands in the days since, I guess. But everybody's really only interested in Jimmy Hoffa, the famous butt of jokes. It was Janwillem, by the way. He was Dutch. I know Jacobsen isn't a Dutch name, but it was his. I met him in Amsterdam. He was a jazz fan, the way only Europeans are jazz fans. They adore jazz musicians. Well, I adored a few myself. Still do.”

  A telephone rang, or buzzed, somewhere in back. Vera hopped off the stool and darted out of the room, quickly returning with a cordless, which she handed to me. “It's your buddy.”

  Jimmy had made a quick check with the Ferndale cops. They knew of no reason anybody would be surveilling that house or street. If I wanted, they'd send a cruiser by to roust my nosy parkers. “You get that?” Jimmy exulted. “Nosy parkers. That's pretty good, eh? I told the Ferndale guy—Terry Moser, remember him, from Palmer Park?—that was the best one I'd heard in ages. You want them to come around? Oh, I checked with a couple other guys who might know about drug stuff, but that was just a flying chance. I ran the plates and the car is registered to . . . well, guess.”