Downriver (17 page)

The other item of interest, included only because the Commodore was thorough and got everything, was a copy of an application for a student loan from the University of Michigan, where Hendriks had taken his accounting degree in 1970. Under PAST EMPLOYMENT Hendriks had listed several positions, including a part-time bookkeeping job at a quick-print shop on Brady.

It wasn’t court evidence. All it meant was that Hendriks had planned and conducted the robbery for which DeVries had gone to prison. He had finessed DeVries into bombing a building as cover and had shot Davy Jackson, his own accomplice, in the act of fleeing the scene. But not where the statue of the lady with the blindfold was concerned. She had to have it in her lap.

I slid all the papers back inside the folder, resealed it with the tape, and locked it in the safe with my shirts and underwear. Then I closed the office and fired up the rented Renault and took off for the National Bank Building, where according to Marianne, Hendriks was working overtime on a Saturday. On the way I unholstered the Smith & Wesson and checked the cylinder. The chambered cartridges glinted golden in the sun. Maybe he’d confess and I’d arrest him, just like on
TV
.

The lobby was nearly deserted, as was the street out front. Lake St. Clair would be jammed with tanning bodies and bright sails. Hendriks and I seemed to be the only ones on company time that afternoon. I punched the button for the express elevator and waited. None of the others stopped at the Marianne offices. I tried twice more. It was out of order. I took the local to the next closest floor and climbed the stairs the rest of the way. Stairwells reveal the true nature of a building. This one was as bleak as a banker’s compassion.

The fire door let me into an anonymous hallway lined with locked doors without identifying signs. Light from a window at the end streamed unbroken down a square tunnel smelling of Mop ’n’ Glo, silent but for an echoing noise somewhere on that floor. At first I thought it was a truck on the expressway. More trundle than rumble, it sounded like a bored child rolling a supermarket cart back and forth, over and over across an uneven floor. I stood listening to it for several seconds before I could tell which direction it was coming from. Then I turned and started that way along the corridor, following my own gray shadow.

No one appeared for the hall’s entire length. My footsteps clapped back on themselves from the walls. They were the only footsteps on that floor.

A door stood ajar a third of the way down. I pushed it open farther and looked at a computer terminal on a steel desk with a swivel chair turned at a right angle. The screen was blank but for the word
HOLD
Hashing on and off in emerald green in its center. A manual the size of a monk’s Bible lay closed on top of the terminal. I withdrew my head. The noise, louder now, seemed to have taken on a distinct rhythm, like a conga line. For no reason that I could put words to I reached back and closed my hand around the butt of the revolver in its holster.

The hall cornered around at the end, where I started down another just as long, the gun out now. The noise was louder yet. At midpoint another short passage divided the inner wall to my right. This was the reception area, where DeVries had trashed two guards yesterday. The noise was there. An arm was there too, on the floor and sticking out from the wall in a dark coatsleeve.

I kept to that wall as I approached it. A head of dark hair sprinkled with gray lay on the arm. Both protruded from inside the express elevator car, where the doors kept trying to close, encountered the arm, and shunted back open to try again. The trundling was hypnotic.

I put the gun in both hands, stepped away from the wall, and executed a policeman’s turn, covering the interior of the car. It was full of dead man and air conditioning. The walls were paneled in smoked glass, starred in three places at the rear where something the size of my finger had struck it. The carpet was stained dark. Part of the stain overlapped into the hallway. The edge smeared when I touched it with a toe.

I didn’t look for a pulse. When the doors were open, Alfred Hendriks’ one visible eye looked past my shoulder, admiring a view I hoped not to see for a long time. He hadn’t been planning on it himself as late as yesterday. It made you think about tomorrow.

Not for long, though. I put away the gun and stepped inside to search those pockets I could reach without disturbing the body. You never know what might show up in a lab these days. His wallet held cab fare and enough cards in plastic windows to clear up the deficit, at least until the bills came. I put it back and took out a leather folder containing the keys to his Porsche and a couple of others. That I pocketed. The contact my hands made with his skin told me he’d begun to cool but not yet to stiffen.

That was as much as his body could tell me. I couldn’t be any more thorough without getting blood on my hands and clothes. (“Kind of sloppy with the spaghetti sauce there. Walker. You won’t mind if Forensics has a look at your tie.”) I left him, not paying much attention now to how much noise I was making. Whoever had done the shooting was as long gone as the smell of spent powder.

Hendriks’ name was lettered in gold on a frosted panel in the front corridor. The first key I tried unlocked the door. More cold-blooded design had gone into this office than into Marianne’s downriver: From deep red pile to hand-rubbed walnut to thick unread first editions on built-in shelves the place was rigged for power. Even the window was bigger, although not nearly as large as the one in Commodore Stutch’s study in Crosse Pointe. The chairs were covered in maroon leather and an Impressionist painting of a locomotive charging through a misty night hung in a heavy gilt frame on one wall. The artist had left it unsigned, but the odds said he was French and dead.

I lifted a corner of the painting, looked at bare paneling behind it, and let it back down. I inspected the carpeting around the desk but there were no breaks or seams where a floor safe might have been installed. The desk was tidy, with no papers or folders left on top. Even the calendar was bare of notations. A neat man, Hendriks. Or a careful one. The drawers were locked. I selected the smallest key on the ring, inserted it in the slot in the top drawer, and turned it. Somewhere inside, a bar slid out of a track, releasing all the drawers.

I wasted time on pencils and stationery until I reached the second drawer on the right side. There a basket rack had been mounted to hold half a dozen computer disks upright in paper sleeves. Each pocket except two was labeled in neat felt-tip capitals on strips of masking tape; current and projected expenditures and profits and monthly business correspondence were all assigned to their proper pockets, each sleeve marked accordingly to keep them from getting mixed up. The remaining two pockets were blank. One of them was empty. I drew the disk out of the other. The sleeve was blank as well. I put them in my coat pocket.

More desk stuff in the other drawers, all good quality but boring. I lifted things from the top and looked under them. Nothing, not even some respectable dust. Where the disk was that belonged in the last pocket bothered me. Then I realized what else was missing from the office, and then I remembered. I touched everything I’d touched a second time, this time with a handkerchief to remove prints, and left the room.

The doors were still trying to close when I passed the elevator alcove. I didn’t know how to stop them short of moving the body, and anyway Hendriks didn’t seem to mind. Around the corner I found the door still open to the room containing the computer terminal. Inside I found something else, a blank paper sleeve with nothing in it on the desk next to the machine.

HOLD
was still flashing onscreen. I sat down and studied the keyboard. That didn’t tell me anything so I hoisted down the manual from atop the terminal and did some homework. After ten minutes I put it back and punched the key marked
ACCESS
. If what I’d read made sense and
HOLD
meant the file was still open, I was already past Security.

The screen went blank and stayed that way for a second. I was starting to think I’d erased the disk in the machine when it began to print out. From left to right the bright green characters darted across in three neat vertical rows headed
INVESTOR
,
AMT INVEST
, and
DATE
, line after line, striping the screen faster than the human hand could type or the human eye could follow. When it finished, the screen was full, with the little green blip that had towed out the data flashing on and off at the end of the last line, awaiting further instructions.

I didn’t have any for it even if I knew how to enter them. I was looking into a universe beyond my tight little orbit of thugs and grifters, bad-check artists and runaway daughters. There were too many abbreviations and acronyms in the left-hand row, too many digits in the middle. I had once held a thousand-dollar bill and another time I had peeked inside a briefcase containing several hundred thousand in neat bills bricked and banded. Millions were abstract numbers in a newspaper article with a Washington dateline. Glimmering there onscreen, all those zeroes presented black holes for a man to fall into and never find bottom. They were like dead men’s eyes. Hendriks’ had been the last to see them, just before he had toppled in.

I shook off their spell and looked for the key that would eject the disk. I didn’t think the disk in my pocket would tell me much more than this one. Someone who spoke the language might. At length the machine kicked it out through a slot in the side and I put it in its sleeve and slid the slim package into my other side pocket. I flipped off the power switch and wiped my prints off the keyboard with my handkerchief. Then I got up and turned toward the doorway, where the guard DeVries had put on the floor yesterday was crouching with his gun pointed at my heart.

“W
HAT HAPPENED
to your face? He do that?”

“No, the big black guy gave me that yesterday. I told you about it.”

“Tell me again.”

The guard sighed and told it. DeVries and I had jumped him and his partner from behind. They had a lively time of it, but they were getting the upper hand when Mr. Piero, their boss, came in and broke it up. They were for turning us in there and then but Mr. Piero said it was bad public relations. “Ask me, bad public relations is them two on the loose and Mr. Hendriks laying there cold as a carp,” he said.

“Tell me again how you found him.”

“I finished my rounds on the other floor and pushed for the elevator. It wasn’t working so I came up the stairs to check it out and that’s when I seen him laying there. I hear footsteps then. There’s no place to duck except the elevator and I’m in there when this guy walks past. My gun’s out but he just keeps walking. I figure he’s making his getaway, only he isn’t, because when I get back out in the hall I hear him in there working the computer. That’s where I got the drop on him. That’s his gun.”

His listener, a chubby towhead I recognized from headquarters called Sergeant Toynbee, looked at my revolver on the doughnut-shaped reception desk. “You handle it?”

“Well, I had to take it off him, didn’t I?”

“Check it out.”

His partner, who was standing closer, picked it up, swung out the cylinder, and held it up to the light to inspect the inside of the barrel. He was a black plainclothesman with delicate features and eyelashes as long as a woman’s.

“Clean.” He flipped the cylinder back into place. “A little dust.”

Toynbee nodded. He called the black officer Banks; Duane when he wasn’t introducing him. The sergeant went over and rested one large ham on the desk and looked at me smoking a Winston on the settee. The guard who had disarmed me and called the cops was sitting inside the doughnut. One side of his face was still bruised and swollen from the run-in with DeVries. Banks was just standing around slapping my gun against his thigh, and the two uniforms who had answered the radio call hovered over the man lying in the elevator, their thumbs hooked in their belts. Someone had found a way to keep the doors open. Hendriks was still dead.

“What’d you do with the piece you used on him?” Toynbee asked me.

“I ate it.”

“It’ll turn up. If it doesn’t we’ll still make the case. We hardly ever get the time to tie up all the loose ends anyway.”

“The case won’t be yours to make after Alderdyce gets here.”

“Who says he’s coming?”

“The guy on the floor. Corporate chiefs are too big for a sergeant’s lap. Also I’d be on my way downtown in cuffs by now if you weren’t expecting him.”

He picked up the leather key folder I had taken off Hendriks’ body. The guard had put it on the desk next to the gun. “Yours?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s got the initials A.H. inside.”

“It belonged to Adolf Hitler. I bought it in a Nazi supply store in Dearborn.”

He picked up the ring containing the keys to the Renault and my house and office. “What about these?”

“I’m a collector.”

He looked at Banks. “You pat him down good?”

“He wasn’t stealing office furniture, if that’s what you mean.”

In fact he and the guard had both missed the flat computer disks in the saddle pockets of my coat. I dumped some ash on the carpet and rubbed it in with my toe. “What the hell, frisk me again. I’m a three-times-a-day man.”

“What were you doing with the computer?” Toynbee asked.

“Saving the world from space invaders.”

“We got us a comic, Duane. Regular Chevy Chase.”

“Makes you miss the guys that exercise their right to remain silent,” Banks said.

Others arrived, including a kid photographer and a Vietnamese medical examiner who hummed while he worked. John Alderdyce came last, in a cocoa poplin suit and a brown tie with gold stripes on a tan shirt. He watched the M.E. fussing over Hendriks’ fingernails.

“Shot?”

“Once in the stomach and once in the thigh.” The Vietnamese sat back on his heels and stripped off his surgical gloves. “Thigh shot did it, from the amount of blood. Hit the femoral. Wouldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes after he went into deep shock.”