“Does that sell? I mean, do you make a living at it?”
“It's all right,” she said. “I don't think you can get rich producing art in America, but if you work hard you can do all right. Anyway, I have plenty of money, enough for me anyway, and I can help out Agge, but she never needs help.” She said this with an edge of pride.
“She seems quite competent,” I agreed.
“Oh, she'll do well. She always has. She's one of those kids who just . . .” And I was treated to a long and happy exposition of the merits of Agge Allyson. I wondered if my mother had ever bored her friends with my triumphs.
11
Kiss Your Axe Good-bye
Grootka's Notebook, #5
We pulled outta Nigger Heaven about 11 P.M., a little over a week after Hoffa dropped outta sight. We was gonna drive up north, and it wasn't a good idea driving in daytime on the interstate, ‘cause somebody could of recognized Hoffa. So we took two cars, with Hoffa and Jacobsen and Lonzo in Lonzo's car, and me and Tyrone in my car. We stayed pretty close together, but not acting like we was together, and in a couple hours we were driving through Clare, which is a nice little town up where the woods begin. It's off the interstate, and from here we hadda drive about forty miles to find another back road.
[Here Grootka provides a map, which is of questionable value and not worth reproducing. It is possible to pinpoint the exact location of the cabin, however, using the map and internal evidence of the notebooks.—M.]
The way we set up the deal was, Carmine and the Fat Man [Humphrey DiEbola.—M.] would go to a motel in Cadillac that Hoffa knew about, that same night. When we were ready we would call the motel and tell them where to meet us. My plan was we would get into the hunting cabin, look the terrain over, and sometime the next day we'd call and it would only take them about a half hour, maybe a little more, to come out and meet. But I sure as hell didn't want them showing up with a bunch of goons, and I didn't want ‘em coming before we was ready.
The cabin was all right, if you don't mind being out in the middle of a goddamn wilderness, which ain't my idea of paradise. It was down a dirt road, about a quarter of a mile from a county blacktop. It was completely in the trees, not on a lake or nothing, so there wasn't no neighbors. Cess Morgan must of been a complete pig, Sister Mary Herman would have straightened him out, but we got the place cleaned up. Anyways, it's down this road, which is almost roofed over with trees, which are these hardwoods, I don't know what kind, but a lot of leaves and it's cool, although later, when it got hot, there wasn't a lot of breeze around the cabin. But it never got too hot.
It's just a hunting cabin, pretty primitive. One room with a sink and a table and cupboards on one end. The sink has a hand pump, so you got running water, more or less, right in the house. Pretty modern for ol’ Cess and his hunting buddies, I guess. And he even built a bathroom on the back, instead of the old shitter, which was still over by the edge of the clearing. The toilet you gotta pour a bucket of water in the cistern to flush. But it works okay. Better than a outhouse, anyway. And there's a propane tank for the kitchen range, which is pretty nice, and a space heater that would run you out of there in below-zero temperatures. But it's a hunting cabin, so it has to have a little stone fireplace and, naturally, Mr. Jimmy Hoffa loves a fuckin’ fire, so we gotta make a fire because it's a little cool at night, and anyway, a fire is always nice. With a little Jim Beam, naturally.
Oh yeah. No electricity. No phone. He had these kerosene lamps with glass chimneys that I kinda liked. Kind of a nice light and it gives off a faint odor that ain't actually too bad.
This clearing is about, oh, the size of a couple of house lots in town, and then the woods start. The road makes a couple jinks, so you can't see very far down it. In the morning, me and Lonzo took a long walk around the woods. There wasn't much to see. It was just woods, pretty big trees. From driving around and all, it looked to me that this was the only house in about a square mile. There was a farmhouse further down, near a crossroads, but too far away to be any concern. The cabin sat in a state forest, there wasn't any logging going on, no farming, no ponds or lakes to attract summer folks. Only good for one thing, and that was for about two weeks in November when guys come up from Detroit to hunt deer. It was probably not even legally Cess's, was my guess. [It belonged to a relative of Morgan's, who was apparently unaware that the cabin still stood and was in use for hunting.—M.]
It looked pretty simple to me. I figured Carmine and the Fat Man would drive out with a stooge or two, to meet Jacobsen, who would be waiting at the end of the road. They would not know that I was even anywhere around. I would of sent Lonzo to meet them, but I thought him being a Negro it might attract attention from passersby, in case there was any, which you never know. Anyways, Jacobsen would hail them down when they come down the blacktop and get in the car with them to ride back on the dirt road. About halfway to the cabin, which is a furlong, if I remember my days at Hazel Park raceway—about halfway down the backstretch. You can't see the road or the house from there and I would have Lonzo's car parked across the road, so nobody could drive right up to the cabin.
Lonzo would be there, at the car. Carmine or the Fat Man could go up to the cabin on foot. Whichever. Lonzo and Jacobsen would let the guys know that the woods was full of Hoffa people, but they didn't want no trouble. Course, they don't know I'm even there. Tyrone I didn't want to get in no trouble, so I had him take my car and drive to a little town, I think it's called Faraway, and make the call to the motel in Cadillac that would start the show. Then, if everything is on, he should make sure the tank is full of gas and drive back to let us know. I'd wait for him by the road. Then he should go on down the blacktop, not toward Cadillac, the other direction—toward Faraway, and then at noon (or whatever time we agree on) he should turn around and drive back. By that time Carmine and them should be there. If there was nobody at the cabin drive, that meant Carmine and them had already gone up and he should park in a place we found about a hundred feet down the road, but off where you wouldn't notice the car unless you was looking for it. From there he could watch the road to make sure there wasn't no surprise reinforcements coming along five minutes behind. If somebody did show, or it didn't look right for some reason, he should blow his horn—his car horn, not the soprano sax he brung along.
If he heard trouble—I mean shooting—I told him to wait right there by the car for fifteen minutes. Don't come in to look around. If I or somebody didn't come along by then to tell him it was all right, there wasn't anything he could do to help us. He should take off and just keep going.
“To where?” he asks me.
“To San Francisco,” I told him. “ ‘Cause if this don't go right, they're gonna be looking for Tyrone Addison for a long, long time. They won't quit.”
But I didn't expect nothing to go wrong, really. Carmine or the Fat Man would play it cool on this first visit. They'd want to get a good look at the situation. Then, the second trip would be the dangerous one. Which is why I told Hoffa to do his best to not blow his top, to keep his cool and just talk it out with them. I didn't want no second meeting.
“Talk at Carmine,” I told him, “but remember that you're talking to the Fat Man. He's the one you gotta convince.”
“I thought just one of them would come up to the cabin,” he says.
“That's what we say, but they'll say no, they both gotta talk to you, and Carmine ain't going up there by hisself. So we give in, but no hoods. Just them two. Anyways, maybe you should come down from the cabin, to greet them.”
“Won't that be dangerous?” he says. “I'm not scared, but what if—”
I knew he wasn't scared and I told him so, and it was damn dangerous. One a them hoods might have a fucking tommy gun or something and start chopping wood. But I didn't think so. Anyways, they didn't have no reason to be afraid of us, I figured, so they wouldn't be throwing too much muscle around when they didn't know the lay of the land. I thought it would be all right if he came down from
the cabin, but stopped just where they could see him. That'd be a few hundred feet maybe, too far for a decent pistol shot, but close enough to yell hello and wave for them to come up. And wait for them.
That seemed okay to Hoffa. “I'll hold my hands up, waving,” he says, “but showing ‘em that I ain't armed. I'm welcoming them. And don't worry, I won't lose my temper. This is important for me, for my family, and for the union.”
“That's the stuff,” I said. But I was bullshitting. It didn't look good to me at all. I figured it would all go wrong, every fuckin’ step. Something stupid would happen and everybody would get killed. But, what the fuck, it looked like an interestin’ mornin’. Hell, maybe we'd get lucky and it'd go at least half-right, which is: they come, they look the place over, maybe even get far enough to see Jimmy waving hello, and then for some reason say they gotta come back.
I'm figuring on that, at least. They'll want to control the play, not let Jimmy set the table. There was a good chance that they wouldn't even be at the motel, or only the Fat Man would be there. In other words, stall for time, try to figure out where this was all going down, see if they couldn't load the dice somehow.
If they wasn't at the motel, or didn't wanta drive out and meet, wanted Jimmy to come to them, or one of us, probably Lonzo, to come and set up a “more convenient” meeting—maybe one of them is sick, say—then Tyrone would tell ‘em politely he'd have to check and would call back later that afternoon. Then he should come back and we'd figure the next stage.
So we had a nice night. I had Lonzo checking around outside, on guard duty, then I took over. Tyrone and Jacobsen alternated taking a long walk around, but keeping out of sight, in case anybody came along. They were armed, but what was the point? Neither one a them had ever fired a gun in their lives, they admitted, but it might help if they at least showed a gun. I gave them each a .32 auto, little throw-down guns that I'd picked up here and there, over the years, which they could carry in their pockets without too much trouble.
But me and Lonzo were heeled. I offered him a .45 auto, but he comes up with a Llama 9 mm, which he likes. He's got some extra clips for it. Plus he brung a 12-gauge pump from home. Me, I've got the Old Cat plus a few other miscellaneous pieces. So I figure we're okay for a first meeting, anyway. I offered a piece to Hoffa, but he says, “No way. This is s'posta be a peace conference, not a war council.”
We was sitting around the fire, having a snort of bourbon, smoking a coupla stogies, and I axed him what he's gonna tell Carmine and the Fat Man. He's gonna have this all talked out by afternoon, he says. He's gonna stay clear of the details of any kind of deal they got with Fitz, but he wants them to know that he's got nothing against ‘em, they always been able to work together and he wants to go on working together, but he knows in his heart that Fitz is not doing the union any good. The membership is disillusioned when they see the kind of shit Fitz pulls, and he don't blame nobody, but when the membership starts droppin’ everybody has got a problem, ‘cause pretty soon you ain't got no union. So they gotta work out their differences, but he thinks they'll see that it's worth their while to have a strong leadership back, and he'll go on TV and tell the fucking world that he's okay, no problem, nothing to do with the Mob, he just had to get away and try to figure out, for himself and for the union, what the future needed, and he decided that it needed him to be back running the Teamsters. Amen.
“Good luck,” I told him.
Later I went out with Tyrone and he brung along his soprano. We both played on it, in the woods, but it seemed a little eerie and I got thinking that maybe it would attract attention, so we quit. It was dark as hell in them woods, so we walked down the drive to the blacktop, where at least you could see the sky, which was crawling with stars, I never seen so many.
I'd been thinking about Tyrone, where he fit into all this. I told him that no matter what happened tomorrow he hadda get the hell outta this. He and Vera fucked up the minute they picked up Hoffa. I knew they had got some idea that somehow they was gonna make something out of this, some money, big money, which would help them get a record out or something. But that was bullshit. There was no way that getting involved could do anything but screw him and Vera. My advice, I said, was to just take off, once he done what I asked him to do.
“You mean just split?” he says. “But what about you, what if you and the guys need help, need a car?”
“We got a car,” I said. “The only reason I insisted on bringing two cars was for this. I told you the plan there, in front of everybody, but that was bullshit. You split. Once you come back and let me know that the deal is running, you split. You ain't no use to us after that, anyways. If everything goes fine I'll ride back to the city with Jim and Lonzo and Janney. They'll be a little pissed at you taking off, but I'll explain to them what I'm telling you now, that I told you to go. Not only that, I gave you the money.”
“Hoffa's money?”
“Yeah. I took it out of his bag, a few days ago. There's two hundred thousand dollars. I left him with two grand, wrapped around some funny money that Books got for me. You take it.”
He argued, but he was just a kid. What could he say against me? Then I told him the toughest part. He hadda forget about Vera. I knew it was hard, I said, but it had to be.
“There's no way out of it,” I told him. “You guys fucked up. No matter what happens now, Tyrone Addison is dead. You seen too much and you don't have no power, nothing to protect you, nothing to offer. You can be dead dead, or you can be fake dead, but after tomorrow there ain't gonna be no Tyrone Addison no more, so you can forget about that part of your life.”
“What about you?” he says. “You blew that guy away, that Cooze.”
“I'm Grootka,” I said. “They don't fuck with Grootka. I'm more trouble than I'm worth. Plus, they think they know me. They figure they can deal with me. I'm in their world, part of their plans. You ain't. You're a jive-ass nigger bopper, no offense. You ain't nothing to them but danger. So at best, if everything goes down like good grits, you don't have no future. And Vera don't have no future with you.”
This was what he really couldn't take, and you can't blame him. But he must of known, they both must of known. If he cut loose from her they prob'ly wouldn't bother her. The Mob don't take chicks seriously. If she became a problem, sure, they'd zip her shut in a heartbeat. But if Tyrone fades and she steers clear, keeps her mouth shut . . . they might survive. I explained it to him, over and over. He wouldn't buy it.
But I insisted. We were standing in the middle of a empty road in a fucking forest in northern fucking Michigan and owls are hooting whenever we quit yelling and I'll tell ya, Mul, I was a little bit, I don't know, not scared, but I'm not so great in the fucking woods at night, it ain't my scene. I'd rather be on Dexter Avenue at four in the morning with a bunch of drunk spades who think I been hiding the bottle. But I put the heat on the kid until he finally broke down and said, “All right, if the deal goes bad, then I'll split.”
“And don't go near Vera,” I said. “Don't even call her. She'll figure it out. She ain't a infant. If I get out of this, I'll talk to her. But you and she are done. Got it?”
“Unless everything's cool,” Tyrone says.
He's still got this idea that if Hoffa can pull this off then he and Vera can go back to their old life and he'll play music and make a hit record and they'll get rich . . . and it just goes on and on. Bullshit.
The next morning me and Lonzo and the others took our walk and figured out the system, like I said, and I sent Tyrone off about eleven. Eleven-thirty he's back, says he talked to Carmine, who agreed to everything and they'd be here in about a half hour. So I sent him off down the road and I take up my spot, which is near the dirt track, in the woods. I can keep an eye on the road, see if there's any other vehicles, make sure Tyrone is in place so he can watch and blow his horn.
High noon and here comes Tyrone, cruising slowly up the county road, but no Carmine. Tyrone eases by, looking at Janney, who shrugs and wa
ves. As Tyrone gets near me, I step out of the woods and wave him on, but Tyrone just proceeds up the road and pulls into the hiding spot we found. I see he's gonna play it that way, so I sigh and move back into my observation spot.
It's another full half hour before Carmine's limo shows. I can't say I was surprised. Another fifteen or twenty minutes and I'd of called it off, ‘cause it meant they was setting something up. But a half hour is not enough to bitch about. Anyways, here they come, tooling up the blacktop in a Town Car, or whatever them things are, but it's all tinted windows and I can't see shit. It ain't like when they came in at Nigger Heaven. Jacobsen hails them and they pull over and the window comes down, a little. Jacobsen says his piece, pointing up the road, then the back door opens and he gets in. I'm watching from inside the woods, not fifty feet away, but they'd never spot me. Still, it makes me nervous, the car just sitting there like that, half on the blacktop and half into the drive, the seconds ticking by like minutes. I'm starting to get interested, wondering what they got to talk so long with Janney for?
But, finally, just when I'm about to go back and signal Hoffa to get lost, the deal's not gonna happen, the car eases into the dirt track and begins to trundle up toward the cabin. I wait a few seconds and step out to the road. From where he's parked, Tyrone should be able to see me. I signal “okay,” with a clenched fist, and for the last time I motion to him to hit the road, waving him off, but there's no response. I look around. I don't see no other cars, nothing.
Oh well, I think, it's his funeral. And I hustle back on up through the woods. I make pretty good time and I'm there to see Lonzo standing behind his car, which is parked across the dirt track, the shotgun out of sight but his right hand is hanging down, and I figure he's got the gun in it. The limo is standing there, twenty feet from him, and Jacobsen is standing outside the open back door. It looks like he's relaying messages back and forth from the guys inside to Lonzo. I hear him yell out, “They want to see your weapon!”
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