Downriver (13 page)

I wondered what was taking place between Alfred Hendriks and Timothy Marianne’s wife and if it had anything to do with anything.

It seems I slept. At some point I stopped thinking about prison and was in it. I had on starched denims and shoes corrugated inside from the rubbing of many feet. Someone big and hairy laid an arm across my shoulders in the library — a library whose books carried no mention of crime or violence or sex, rows of
North American Birds
, anglers’ guides, and Laura Ingalls Wilder — and told me I was his girlfriend tonight. I ducked the arm and then was glad to find myself suddenly in my own bed in darkness. Only something was wrong with that, because my bedroom is never dark. There’s a streetlamp outside the window. Then I smelled cigar smoke.

He was sitting in front of the window, the solid dark bulk of him standing out a little from the night. The orange eye of his cigar hovered around his thighs, then came up, etching a glowing trail, and brightened as he pulled at it, highlighting a city block of face and light hair and beard. Then it subsided. Gray smoke caught its light, turning in the still air.

“You sleep hard.” He sounded cheerful.

“You work quiet.” I sat up, not too quickly. “My wallet’s there on the bureau. You don’t want the watch. Not worth the trip to the pawnshop.”

“I’m not a burglar.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t be. Okay if I turn on the light? When I get the hell beat out of me I like to see it.” I keep the Smith & Wesson on the lamp table at night.

“I’m not muscle either.”

“Listen, it’s okay, so long as you don’t find me attractive. I just went through that.”

“Not hardly. You must lead an interesting life.”

“More all the time.” I waited.

“I knocked. No one answered, so I came in.”

“The guy that sold me the lock said it was burglarproof.”

“No such thing. I was a locksmith’s apprentice. There are just so many kinds and I’ve knocked them all down and put them back together. Combination’s the best, but who wants to live in a bank vault?” He puffed. His eyes were set back under a round brow. “Get dressed. We’re going somewhere.”

“Casual, or shirt and shoes?”

“Doesn’t matter. The Commodore isn’t picky.”

I
TURNED ON THE LIGHT.
To hell with permission. The gun wasn’t there.

“Over here,” he said. “On the windowsill. You ought to keep it under your pillow.”

“Not in this weather. They rust when you sweat on them.” I looked at him. He was a healthy thirtyish in a gray double-breasted with tight black leather gloves on his hands. His face was round and smooth and babyish but for the ginger-colored beard. His hair was lighter, curly, and starting to recede. He had Irish eyes. His boots were black vinyl with zippers inside the ankles and he wore his pants outside them. As far as I could tell he went a little under six feet and something over two hundred, some of it fat but not enough. I said, “I know someone who could take you.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. I’m not tough.” He forked the cigar between gleaming black fingers and ground it out in one of my ashtrays in his other hand. “I don’t mean to rush you, but the old man isn’t going to live forever.”

“He already has. If we’re talking about Commodore Stutch.”

“There’s another?”

I got up and dug a pair of slacks and a sportshirt out of the bureau. I didn’t see myself getting back to sleep that night anyway. The alarm clock read eleven after two. “He’s awake at this hour?”

“It’s his best one. He fades out around four, but he does more in those two hours than anyone you ever heard of does in eight. I watched him bail out a country once.”

“Must’ve been something to see.” I tucked in the shirt.

“Not really. Just the old man making a couple of calls, until you thought about what he was doing. It beat hell out of the limousine rental business.”

“That what you did before?”

“Yeah. His regular guy didn’t show up at the airport one time and I was there hustling fares. He hired me on the way to his place and used the cellular phone to fire his old guy. The limo was new, so he bought that too. That was, what, six years ago.”

I tied my shoes. “You must like the work.”

“The hours stink, but it pays great. He doesn’t get out much anymore. Mostly I run errands.”

“Like putting the snatch on PI’s.”

“It isn’t a snatch. I almost forgot.” He pulled an envelope out of his jacket and tossed it on the bed. The springs swayed. “For your time.”

I picked it up and counted the new bills inside. “My time’s not worth this much.”

“Call it a tip.”

I held out one bill — Grant’s one of my favorite presidents — and flipped the rest into his lap. “Buy yourself some better cigars. I’ll talk to the man first.”

“Six years,” he said, looking inside the flap. “Nobody’s ever handed back one of the old man’s envelopes without an audience to appreciate it.”

“Maybe they were afraid you’d forget to tell him.”

“Your house. I guess you can call anybody a crook you want to in it.” He stood and put away the package. “Ready?”

“Do I get to ride up front?”

“Sure. Be nice having someone to talk to for a change.”

He loved to talk. I learned he’d given up locksmithing because his fingers were too big, driven a cab for a couple of years, then went to work for the limousine company and was saving up for a reconditioned stretch Lincoln of his own when the Commodore came along and offered him twice what he could have made freelancing. Now he was driving a gray Cadillac with cream leather seats and a fuzzbuster and CD player built into the dash. His taste ran toward Julie Andrews and the Original Ink Spots.

“What was that about finding you attractive?” he asked. He didn’t miss a green light the whole way.

“Just a dream I had. You ever do time?”

“Uh-uh. You?”

“Just the soft kind.”

“I’d crack up,” he said. “I’ve got to move. It’s another reason I left the shop.”

“What do they call you, Irish?”

“Gerald. And I’m Swiss on both sides.”

The Grosse Pointe house was on Lake Shore Drive, of course, with a view of St. Clair shining like polished shale under the same narrow moon I had seen in Birmingham earlier that night. He swung through the open gate, wound through a quarter-mile of lawn, and stopped in front of a round white portico attached to all the brick east of Wisconsin, where he unlocked my door from a button on his side of the car.

“Go right in, they’re expecting you. The old man doesn’t like leaving the car outside in this damp air. He’s cheap about some things.”

I had my choice of two doors, either of which would have let in Moby Dick on a platter. I chose the one on the right. The big front hall echoed when I drew the door shut behind me. A gold-bordered rug big enough to carpet all the walls, floors, and ceilings in my house looked puny in the center of a tesselated floor an acre across. Other than that the room was bare, lit gloomily by the fanlight over the door. I had been standing there the better part of a minute when a heavy dark-suited bald man separated himself from the shadows and came my way, being careful to walk around the rug. I wondered if that was a house rule.

“Mr. Walker? I’m Hector Stutch, the Commodore’s grandson.” He took my hand in a doughy palm.

I got it back as quickly as I could without offending him. “I’ve seen your picture, Mr. Stutch. You run Stutch Petrochemicals.”

“I’m the president and board chairman, yes. Does our generation really run anything?”

He had at least a generation on me, but I didn’t say anything. He arranged his face into a businesslike mode. It was as doughy as his hand. “I wonder if I might speak with you before you see Grandfather.”

“The Commodore is ready for Mr. Walker.”

I hadn’t seen or heard this one coming. He was my age, dark and Arabic-looking, in a white coat and pants and white shoes with rubber soles, which explained his silent approach. The outfit looked medical, but a tailor had been at it. He didn’t dump it into any community hamper at the end of the day.

“Yes.” All the business went out of the soft face. It was like hoisting a white Hag. “This is Raf, Grandfather’s nurse.” He spelled the name. “He’ll take you to him. I’d be grateful if you’d see me before you leave.”

“Aren’t you coming along?”

“He hasn’t been invited,” said Raf.

Hector glared. “I’m capable of telling Mr. Walker that.”

“The study is this way.”

I accompanied Raf down a passage illuminated by fluorescent tubes mounted over portraits best left dark. “What was all that?”

“The Commodore seldom confides in his grandsons.”

“That’s your privilege, huh?”

“A man his age has no secrets from his nurse.” He rapped on a heavy maple door and opened it for me.

The room was nearly as large as the entrance hall. The rug was identical and the walls, paneled in baroque carvings, towered into darkness above a dome of green light on a massive old desk at the rear. Behind it, tall drapes covered a Cinemascope window to within a foot of the center. Squarely between them sat a thin very old man. His ears turned out, what hair he had was very pale and very fine, and his skull was plain under the skin of his face. Only his head was visible in the eerie green light, resembling in its disembodied absolute stillness the pendulum of a stopped clock. He looked dead.

The door clicked behind me and I realized I was alone with him. I started forward.

“Stay there,” he snapped. “I need a magnifying lens to read a newspaper, but I can count the strokes of a hummingbird at a hundred yards.”

I stopped. “That must be a hot betting item at picnics.”

“Levity in the young is unseemly. Repellent in the old.”

“I fall somewhere in the middle.”

“Shut up and learn.”

His voice was thin but far from weak. It had a New England crack in it you don’t hear much anymore, even in New England. I shut up.

“Your name is Amos Walker, no middle initial,” he said. “You’re thirty-six years old. You fought in Vietnam and Cambodia, not without distinction, re-upped and transferred to the military police after you shipped home, left there after three years, and received your private investigator’s license while employed with Dale A. Leopold, deceased, at Apollo Investigations. You’re divorced — irreconcilable differences — live alone, drink rather too much but you’re not an alcoholic, and smoke Winstons. The application you filed for a MasterCard last month has been turned down. Right so far?”

“I don’t know about the application. I’m still waiting for word.”

“Trust me. You were dropped from the Detroit Police Academy just before graduation for assault and battery of a fellow cadet, a congressman’s son. Reason given was he made a homosexual advance on you in the shower. What was it really?”

“I didn’t like his towel.”

“Bah. What’s your interest in Alfred Hendriks?”

“I give up, what?”

The head moved a fraction of an inch. “I’ve paid you well for this information.”

“You paid me fifty bucks for pulling me out of a nice warm nightmare and dropping me in this mausoleum. Ask Gerald for the rest.”

“You gave it back?”

“My house has been hit twice in a few days. I didn’t want it lying around.”

“Sit down. Please.”

He had to twist his mouth to get the word out. It had been cooped up in there a long time. The chair nearest his desk was a big chocolate leather overstuffed, as heavy as a tractor wheel. I sank into it, and when I found bottom we were still far enough apart to fly pigeons. At that angle he was wearing a metallic gray suit and a striped necktie snugged up painfully tight for three in the morning. Loose skin hung over the collar in speckled garlands.

“Go ahead and smoke,” he said. “I never did but I always liked the sting of it. Henry didn’t. He was the very last to install ashtrays in his cars. Stubborn bastard.”

It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Henry Ford. I lit up, using my cupped hand for an ashtray. His office had nothing on Henry’s cars. Raf would probably have seen to that.

He was looking at me. His eyes were large and very much alive in the skull face. “Returned the money. You’re past your era. I started this business on a handshake. Not the petrochemicals business, the other one. That was how we did things then. Not like now. If I paid in taxes what I’m paying lawyers to keep me from having to pay taxes, I’d be ahead of the game. If I could spit, which I haven’t had the energy to do since I was ninety, I couldn’t do it without hitting a calfskin briefcase. That’s the only leather you’ll find in the industry these days, the lawyers’ briefcases. Have you smelled a new car lately, Walker?”

“Cheap shoes.”

“Worse. A new car should smell of leather and varnished wood. Well, it’s one of the reasons I got out. The business didn’t smell the same. It wasn’t just the plastic, it was the smell of the people I found myself doing business with. Japs and gangsters. Arabs now, like my nurse. You met Raf ?”

“He doesn’t think much of your grandson.”

“Which one, Hector? Hector’s competent. He won’t gamble, though, and that’s how I built this company. The first one too. It’s probably my fault. He’s scared of me. His father wasn’t, but I raised him myself. My son wouldn’t have anything to do with the business. I wish his sons had half his guts, but if they did they wouldn’t be here. I’d give up the reins if I wasn’t convinced they’re what’s keeping me alive. I’m fond of living, obviously.”

“You’re my first centenarian,” I said.

“What I am is a freak. But I won’t be spoken to as one. I’m wandering, where was I? Yes, the Japs. I never liked doing business with them. Not that I’m one of these wimps screaming for trade restrictions. The Big Three have been rolling fat for decades, forgot what it’s like to compete. Peerless, Hudson, Studebaker, Durant, Edison, Packard, Rickenbacker — bet you never knew Captain Eddie tried his hand at automaking; lost his shirt, too — two dozen more, they’re all gone now. American Motors is anybody’s whore. It’ll do the survivors good to sweat a little. That has something to do with why I told Hector to sign seven hundred and fifty million over to Marianne.”