3
Come Out
“I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.”
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, nobody 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 substituted 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 bastards 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 superstition, real killers. Most of ‘em was bandits back there, but kind of like folk heroes, like Robin Hood or some fuckin’ thing, ‘cause they're against the landowners and the gentry. They believe in witches and elves, the evil eye, that kind of shit. 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. Nobody gives a rat's ass 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 ‘Fuck ‘im.’ I threw his ass 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 sexual 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.
It makes a difference who you kill, I'm sure. It even makes a difference who you say you killed. I never gave it a thought, at the time, though I occasionally reflected on it, later, after Grootka died.
(He died in the act of saving my life, by the way, which is something that I won't pass on to Ms. Allyson.) But here is the chief significance of this rambling discourse: Grootka set a trap for Galerd Franz, and incidentally inveigled me into the investigation, by the technique of using an abandoned car as a crypt. So you can see, when I reflected on his earlier confession it had the ring of authenticity.
Grootka lived alone in an apartment on Van Dyke, not far from the Detroit River. He claimed he spent most of his time trying to avoid his landlady, the widow of a rabbi, whom he believed was trying to entrap him into marriage. But the thought of anyone, much less a nice Jewish widow, wanting to marry Grootka required imagination. More than imagination: a willing suspension of disbelief. Grootka had been raised in a Catholic orphanage, St. Olaf's, I think, and whether he was a good Catholic or not, he was definitely a Catholic: he was still having nightmares about nuns, by his own account, as late as a week or two before he died. (In fact, I think he had a superstitious fear of nuns, or it may be of ghosts—this man who was otherwise as fearless as a badger.)
And now, in two days, two different people had asked me seriously about Grootka—not just “Hey, remember how that asshole Grootka used to stick a cigarette in his nose and blow smoke out of his ears—how did he do that?” but real, genuine questions. Ms. Agge Allyson seemed sincere, once you got past the notion of someone actually funding a history of the police department. But why would a Mr. Luckle from Accounting be interested? I didn't even know there was an Accounting office in the Detroit Police Department. Well, that's not quite true. I knew there was an Accounting section, but I thought that was part of the Racket and Conspiracy division. I decided to call my old buddy Andy Deane at R&C.
“Lucky?” Andy said. I could just about see Andy's freckled face wrinkled in confusion. He resembled a middle-aged Huck Finn. “The only Lucky I know is some kind of gink over at Internal Investigations.”
“He said ‘Luckle,’ but maybe it's the same gink. Is this Lucky a major gink? A dinky gink? A rinky-dink gink?”
“That'd be your elemental finky gink,” Andy said. “They're mostly finks in Eye-Yi.”
“Hm. Well this Lucky gink was asking me about Grootka.”
“Grootka? What about Grootka?”
“That's what I said,” I said. “He said he was from Accounting, or something like that, and that he was inquiring about funds that Grootka may have expended for informational services . . . something like that.”
“Something like that, hunh?” Andy was being wonderfully informational today. “We're talking about music lessons, right?”
Music lessons were what one might waggishly call payments for information—squealer stipends, fink funds. I told Andy that Mr. Lucky seemed keenly interested in Grootka's music tuition. But these funds were, to say the least, discretionary. Plus they were awfully petty—chump change. Half the time, the detective paid them out of his own pocket. Still, there was usually a bit of small change around for this purpose. I had no doubt that Grootka would have exploited this resource, no matter how miniscule, to the max. Well, if the department was looking for restitution I could give them his last known address: Section VIII, Lot 2707, Mount Elliott Cemetery.
I said good-bye to Andy and turned my attention to more pressing concerns. Namely, a real live criminal named Humphrey DiEbola, currently residing in Grosse Pointe Shores. It occurred to me, just now, that the first time I'd seen DiEbola, I was with Grootka. We were walking down one of those gloomy, echoing hallways at 1300 Beaubien, the Detroit Police Headquarters, when we approached a small flock of twittering lawyers surrounding a very large and red-faced man who was walking resolutely along, apparently ignoring them. He stopped at our approach, however, and said, with a beaming smile, “Grootka! An honest face, at last!”
That had been good for laughs. At the time, I'd been assigned to Homicide, assistant to Grootka. Nobody else wanted to work with him. But we got along, after a fashion. I spent four years there, with Grootka. It was a record. Guys would come up to me and congratulate me, shaking their heads. But I liked it, pretty much. The man taught me a lot. He taught me things that I don't believe I would have gotten from anyone else. On this occasion, he introduced me to Humphrey DiEbola, who was known far and wide as the Fat Man. Later, when DiEbola ascended to the boss's position, the nickname vanished in the wind. And, in fact, DiEbola himself went on an amazing diet that trimmed him dramatically down to where the nickname would have been inappropriate, anyway.
I was interested that DiEbola seemed genuinely pleased to see Grootka. “I known him a long time,” Grootka explained, when we walked away. “Hell, I knew his old man. Another one a them mean-ass Lucanians. He called hisself Gagliano, but I think it was just the name of the village up in the hills that he come from.”
I was puzzled: how did a son of “Gagliano” become a DiEbola? Grootka laughed. “He made it up, just like the old man—or maybe that's what the old man told him his real name was. It sounds kind of like gentry, see? Like he was the duke of Eboli, in the old country. Eboli is a larger town, down by the coast. These guys come over here and maybe, if they're around their paisanos in New York, they go by names that they were known by in the old country. But then, like old Gags, you set off for Detroit to make a name for yourself, you can call yourself anything you want.”
Grootka had known most of the older mobsters. They were all immigrants, he said. “Throwbacks,” Grootka called them. “They all look alike, kind of short, dark, round-faced—like Humphrey—they got these wide, thin lips. It ain't that usual Medatrainyun look, that thin eagle face like Carmine. These are some ancient people. Gags told me some of them live in caves. Maybe they're the missing link.” They were very tough, he said. Gagliano had been one of the tougher ones, but he and Grootka had gotten along in the peculiar fashion of cops and robbers—a kind of grudging respect.
In many ways, Grootka's experience had been similar to theirs: poverty, a rough upbringing. Gagliano, for instance, had run away from home as soon as possible, getting to New York in his teens. Like many, he had gone back when he had made some money, to play the role of the gentry. But like most of those, he hadn't been able to bring it off.
“It's tough,” Grootka observed. “You go back in your flashy suit and Florsheim shoes and you find out they still ain't as good as what the real gentry got, and then they wear out. You buy some land and they cheat you—you pay too much, the land's no good, the well is dry. Pretty soon you knock some peasant babe up. You're just about out of money, ‘bout the time the Florsheims wear out on that stony ground. It's time to go back to America, now or never. You're gonna be a peasant if you don't watch out. Gags got out in the nick of time. He brought the kid with him, but not the mother. Maybe she was too ugly or a witch—he believed in love potions, they all do. He hooked up with one a these Sicilian babes in Detroit, she raised the kid like it was her own—Umberto prob'ly thinks she's his real ma. Gags got careless doing a hit and got his own ass wiped when the kid was only about six or something, I don't remember. The kid grew up with Carmine, I think the mothers was sisters, not the real mother, but the step. Umberto was always Carmine's fat cousin. Except he's smarter than Carmine. But the way things were laid out—it's Fate, see, and these mopes believe in Fate like it was the Blessed Virgin—Umberto (he calls himself Humphrey, after Bogart!) ain't never going to be boss, unless he's very patient. Which he is.”
Grootka was prescient. At the time, Humphrey was just Carmine's lieutenant. But now he was the boss.
For some time now my chief concern had been with Humphrey and his minions, especially one Joe Service (actually, not a regular hand of DiEbola's, but a favored contractor). Lately, I had managed to bring down Service—he was currently recovering in a Colorado hospital—but Humphrey himself was another matter. He seemed untouchable. ‘What I wanted was an entrée into the big man's field of operations. Every week I spent at least a few hours sifting through old files and trying to make pieces fit, but so far nothing seemed to work.
I was getting weary of this pursuit. Another part of me wanted nothing more than to just be a harness bull, as the old movies have it. Just work the precinct. By contrast with the complex strategies that would be needed to bring down a Humphrey DiEbola, the day-to-day chase-and-file grind of the precinct looked like a vacation. But it's never a good idea to think that you can take things easy.
I must have been thinking out loud: Jimmy Marshall knocked on the doorjamb of my office. Jimmy used to be my assistant; now he's my boss. We get along fine. It's a good thing to train the man who becomes your boss. He tends to do things the way you would do them. Now Jimmy had the headaches and I had the pleasant task of commiserating with him and encouraging him. At the moment Jimmy had the unenviable task of informing me that I was in violation of basic police department regulations. To wit, I was not living within the Detroit city limits, as required by chapter 3, section 48, of the police manual.
This was not news. But it was an embarassment. For many years it had become commonplace for officers to reside outside the city. The issue had become an open scandal in the last few years, since the extraordinary transformation of Detroit had become so pronounced. Between the 1980 census and that of 1990, there had been a population decline in Wayne County (which comprises just about all of the city), of about 220,000 people. Almost all of these were whites. There had been a corresponding decline in the number of police officers, most of whom were also white.
Presumably, to forestall this defection of white officers, not much was said when a white officer moved to Warren or Royal Oak, or, in my case, back to my original home in Saint Clair Flats, which is in Macomb County. But it was expected that the officer would maintain at least an accommodation address—i.e, an “official” address in the city. After a while, though, quite a few of the officers neglected even this, including, I confess, me. Nothing was said, but it had been in the back of my mind, and I knew that one day it would become an issue.
I agreed with the basic principle here: a police officer should reside in the community where he or she has power and responsibility; to do otherwise is to court disaster. The citizenry are always skeptical (to say the least) about the responsiveness and empathy of the police power. A healthy community cannot afford a police force that is not resident in the community where it hopes to function. I knew this and understood it, but I wasn't easy with the popular notion that this problem was a consequence of simple racism: i.e, that the whites (including the police) had left Detroit out of racial hatred. There is no denying that race was a huge factor; it's just that I thought there were other, not unrelated, economic and psychological aspects. It's not worth splitting hairs about, however: it was race.
My excuse—or really, not an excuse, but merely a reason—was that I was only temporarily absent and, anyway, it was merely a matter of convenience. I expected to return to the city, oh, just about any time now.
I'd had an apartment in the city, years before. It had been fun, for a while. But then other guys had begun to exploit the situation, asking me to list them as roommates and so on. And then they had taken to using the place as a trysting site. I finally got fed up with it and, since my mother didn't seem to mind. . . . Well, let's be ckar about this: at one time I thought my mother was happy to have me move back home.
In those days, not so long after the death of my father, she was still in a conventional-widow mode. She wore black dresses and pinned a hat with a veil to her gray hair when she went to teas, where she conspired with her Eastern Star cronies about marrying their daughters and granddaughters to me. When I recollect this, it's shocking. I wonder if it shocks her.
She had never been very impressed with my police career, to say the least. It had quite stunned her, I gather. But then she began to develop new and compelling interests. Bird-watching was the key. She became obsessed with birds, which led to a more serious concern with the environment, and travel. Soon, she was hardly ever at home. And she began to get younger as I grew older, curiously enough, transforming herself from a conventionally maternal woman, a widow in corsets, into a slender, somewhat unisex athlete who traipsed about in Gokey brogans when she wasn't dashing about in spandex. She bought a mountain bike, and rode it! Correspondingly, she lost any interest, it seemed, in my marital status or career aspirations. She didn't have the time.
For my part, I had become conscious of the racial implications of Detroit's transformation but, as I say, not totally convinced of a racist character. On the surface, I felt, it had an overwhelmingly racist quality, but I'd always been a little suspicious of the conventional view of racism. I had a gut feeling that many seemingly racist behaviors might be more accurately attributed to a variety of other, more complex, factors. For instance, leaving aside the racial composition of Wayne County, there was the fact was that there had been a considerable decline in the earning power and income of all Detroit residents, generally. When people are poor things get dangerous. It wasn't safe, no matter who you were. In short, it had become an increasingly less attractive place, and as a consequence, the nearby suburbs, particularly just north of the city, in Oakland and Macomb Counties, seemed more attractive. But who could afford to move there? Only white people, particularly since (and here is really where racism came into play) black people were largely discouraged to do so, especially by the realtors, who probably told their consciences that they were simply acting in a businesslike manner. I'm being a little facetious, but not completely. Realtors widely believe that white people don't like black people—they don't look beyond conventional notions—and so they exacerbate real racism (i.e., deeply held notions of some white people about the inferiority or undesirableness of blacks) by adopting an economic racism to protect their business interests.
No doubt the problem was much more complex than this, but I won't dilate on it. For now, my problem was to accommodate to the new reality. My boss was under pressure to bring his department into compliance with the regulations. Specifically, that meant enforcing the residency requirement for white officers. Jimmy was not accusatory. But he was the lieutenant. I was the sergeant. It was time for me to move to town or resign.
“So, I'll move to town,” I said. “I knew it was coming. I'm sorry I didn't do it on my own.”
“Good. Thanks, Mul. But.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “It has to be soon. No delays. They're talking ninety days.”
“Ninety days. You got it. There's lots of vacancies in town. Rents are low. Shouldn't be a problem. What else you got?” He was carrying a sheaf of papers.
What he had, he said, was a “grounder,” which is what one might call a nonjob. Some kid was getting a weird transmission on his computer and he was worried about it. He thought it might be criminal in some way. But it didn't seem criminal, on the face of it.
The transmission was a message, from some kind of cover name or alias, it looked like. Somebody named Hexam. Gaffer
Hexam. The transmission featured a crudely animated cartoon, or “graphic,” that depicted a woman being killed. She was being killed in a series of buffoonish ways, as if it were a Road Runner cartoon, except that the cartoon wasn't anything like as slick as the Road Runner. A sort of generic stick-figure woman with exaggerated pyramidal breasts and a cloud of white or blond hair, in a triangular skirt, stalks jerkily along a city street, a business district of tall buildings, arms swinging. A huge chunk of concrete, part of a building, falls on her. Her hands and feet stick out from under the concrete slab. In another sequence, the woman is walking on a bridge over what appears to be the Detroit River, judging by the skyline in the distance; in fact, it seems to be the Belle Isle Bridge. She stops to talk to a much larger figure, a man in a dark outfit of some kind—a cloak, or maybe just a long overcoat. Suddenly, the man's arms fly up—there's no other way to describe this—and then the woman tips over the railing of the bridge and disappears. In the third and final sequence, the woman is smashed by a speeding limousine that flattens her. After that, a question mark rises on the screen, followed by the words, “Where? When?”
The kid had recorded this on a little square disk. He seemed like a nice enough boy, about sixteen, a student, tall and gawky but nice looking. “It seemed kind of weird,” he told me. “You see weird stuff on the Net sometimes, but this seemed so direct.”
“Is there any way of checking back, through the channels or something?” I asked. I wasn't familiar with the system, as you can tell. The kid, whose name was Kenty, didn't think it could be traced. Or maybe it could be, but it would be very difficult and time-consuming and if it wasn't of any interest to the cops then he sure wasn't going to waste time on it. But he thought it might be interesting because it had what seemed to be a specific person's name attached and it bothered him because it had been sent directly to his E-mail.
The “graphic,” as the boy called it, was directed to “Sgt. Fang Mulhiesen [sic], 9th Precinct.” Directed in the sense that the opening panels of the “graphic” carry a title or heading as above. And the closing panels also carry a heading: “by Gaffer Hexam.” It was a mystery to me. But I said I'd look into it. Just the utterance of that fateful cliché seemed to sink the boy's heart, and mine too. He muttered something about “Let me know” and “I'll see you” and left. I sighed and set the disk aside.
“Why would a ‘disk’ be square?” I asked Jimmy. He shrugged. “A disk is a round thing,” I said. A blank look. “If it was meant for me, why send it to him?”
“It got to you, didn't it?”
“Yeah, it got to me, but why not send it direct?”
“How would you do that?” Jimmy asked. “What's your E-mail address?”
I thought about that. What was there to say? “Oh well, what else have you got?”
We had a young man who had come all the way from Mexico, looking for his brother, who was last known to be employed at Krispee Chips, a potato-chip factory in this precinct. This young man did not speak English and we had no Spanish speakers in the precinct. He had been to Missing Persons, downtown, but they had sent him out to us. Communication was difficult, but somehow, with the help of a couple of other officers, we pieced together a little information. We were interested in his story because Krispee Chips is an important feature of Mob presence in Detroit. Humphrey DiEbola is the C.E.O. It is believed that innumerable aliens are cycled in and out of the country through Krispee Chips, as putative employees. These are almost always Italians. We'd never heard of Mexicans at Krispee Chips.
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-to-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.