Downriver (21 page)

“I’d have no reason to take that risk. If it were true.”

“I had to ask.” I got up. “Thanks for seeing me. I still don’t like gangsters.”

“I’m a restaurateur.”

“You make good espresso. Save the baklava for somebody whose sweet tooth kicks in earlier than mine.”

“Don’t come back.”

I got to my favorite Woodward bar a few minutes before noon and stood smoking on the sidewalk among the class of people who stand around Sunday mornings waiting for bars to open. Some of them were dressed better. I consoled myself with the difference between ends and means. When the barkeep threw open the bolts I took the end stool and ordered a Strohs.

The keep had the
TV
set over the bar turned on with the volume down, warming up for the baseball game. I drank beer and tapped ash into a cheap glass tray and watched a dancing wiener cha-cha with a jar of French’s mustard. A laid-off GM worker and a junior high school track coach argued politics at the other end of the bar. When I looked at the screen again my client was on it.

It was an old front-and-profile mug from Jackson, where DeVries had spent the first part of his sentence before getting kicked up to Marquette. He was slimmer and beardless and still had his hair, but it wouldn’t make much difference. A Swede who stood six-eight and weighed 280 would be stopped for questioning that day. I told the barkeep to turn up the sound.

“... believed still at large in the Detroit metropolitan area. Police declined to say why DeVries is a suspect. Hendriks, shown here during a press conference Thursday ...”

I asked him to change channels. Two stations over they were showing black-and-white footage I hadn’t seen in years, of city blocks in flames and people bucket-brigading furniture and
TV
sets out of smashed shop windows and paratroopers in incongruous camouflage trading automatic fire with unseen snipers on littered streets.

“... convicted in 1967 of felony murder and conspiracy to commit armed robbery after he set fire to draw attention from ...”

On the next channel, a black woman reporter was interviewing the security guard who had held me for the police in the Detroit office of Marianne Motors, and whom DeVries had knocked down and stood on the day before that.

“... busted in here yelling for Mr. Hendriks to show himself. I wanted to call the cops then, but Mr. Piero — that’s my boss ...”

“Okay, put it back.”

“There’s what comes of turning killers loose.” The barkeep returned to the original station, where a young weatherman was calling football signals over Kansas. “I’m with Cecil Fish. Let’s get back the death penalty in Michigan.”

“Iroquois Heights prosecutors make that same noise every couple of years,” I said. “None of them’s made governor yet.”

“Well, he’s got my vote.”

“He deserves it.”

The keep leaned his big meaty face close enough to tell me he was a better customer there than I was. “What might that mean?”

“It means I need a new favorite bar.” I paid for the beer and left.

I had an acquaintance in Security at the Detroit Public Library who let me in the back way when it was closed. I found the drawers containing old issues of the
News
and
Free Press
on microfilm and clamped the ones I wanted into a machine in the reading room. I was getting to know the layout better than the warehouse district and Detroit Police Headquarters. The private eye of the future will wear spectacles with Coke-bottle lenses and carry a rubber thumb in place of a gun. He will talk in computerese and spend good drinking time browsing in the software department at Hudson’s. That’s if he’ll be needed at all, with a portable electronic brain in every household. Of course he will be. People will always need someone to stand in front of bullets and fists aimed at them.

Nineteen sixty-eight blurred past, stopping here and there at pictures of DPW crews cleaning up riot damage and young longhairs in fatigue pants with flags sewn to the seats and soldiers on the line in Vietnam with flowers in the muzzles of their M-16s and Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy campaigning and Bobby Kennedy lying on his back on a hotel floor with surprise and confusion on his face. It made me feel as old as erosion.

It took an hour longer than I’d expected. Even then I missed it the first time and had to turn back on a hunch. It claimed two inches of the city section between an interview with Mayor Cavanaugh and an illustrated advertisement for Listerine that promised an end to sore throats caused by viruses.
“CITY CIRL KILLED IN AUTO MISHAP,”
read the headline. I digested all it had to offer in ten seconds and turned, unenlightened, to the obituaries.

SOUWAINE, MARY FRANCES

Aged 19, died suddenly Monday, Oct. 14. Born May 11,1949, in Birmingham, Ala., daughter Harold and Mary Katherine (Joiner) Souwaine. They preceded her in death. Moved to Detroit 1967. Attended Wayne State University. Survived by a sister, Edith. No services planned. Donations in lieu of flowers to the National Highway Safety Council.

I read it through twice. Then I put back the microfilms, found some more recent ones in another drawer, and spent another hour with them. They only went back five years, but they made me feel just as old.

The little parking lot on West Grand River was as barren as a proving ground. I crossed the street on foot against no traffic at all and used my key in the front door because the super had locked up and gone home. He had stopped living on the premises after a black revolutionary had cut loose at me with a light assault rifle in the foyer. It’s a lonely sort of life but not always dull.

My building was quieter than the library, quieter even than the Detroit office of Marianne Motors with Hendriks dead in the elevator and the doors bumping him like amateur pallbearers trying to carry a coffin through a narrow doorway. The stairwell echoed and the hallway on my floor with its dingy linoleum and impertinent new suspended ceiling might have belonged to an evacuated shelter. I was alone. Even rats don’t hang around a place where there is no promise of food. The busted brokers, dirty-nailed tailors, credit dentists with Mexican degrees, chiropractors, sign painters, orange-haired cosmeticians, electrical contractors, legal experts with malfeasance suits pending,
TV
repairmen, palmsters, tattoo artists, carpet salesmen, escort pimps, bookies, clowns, geeks, freaks, Sikhs, mercenaries and model agencies, martial-arts instructors with greasy smocks and tattered eastern philosophies, all the floating jetsam from the higher rents downtown, were home living their lives or away trying to forget them. I felt like the last whooping crane.

A shadow fell across me while I was unlocking the door to my outer office. I knew who it was without turning around. I pushed the door open and stood clear to let him inside.

I
SET THE BOTTLE
and a glass on the desk. DeVries ignored the glass, fisted the bottle, and pointed the base at the ceiling. It glugged twice and he pounded it back down and swept a flanneled arm across his mouth. Sweat broke out in studs on his forehead when the heat hit his belly. I turned on the fan and pushed some stale air around.

“Stuff tastes like piss,” he said. “You drink it all the time?”

“It loses something without the ceremony.” I sat down and put my feet on the scribble pad. “Hot, isn’t it? Especially where you are.”

“Guy left his office open next door.”

“Who let you into the building?”

“Little Jewish guy on his way out. I said I had an appointment with you. He said not to make no holes in the walls. What’d he mean?”

“Insider humor. He recognize you?”

“Didn’t act like it.”

“If he did he wouldn’t do anything about it. Rosekrantz doesn’t even mind his own business.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d show today, but I couldn’t stay where I was.”

“No Sundays in this work. Drop a load.”

He remained standing. “I didn’t do it.”

I picked up the bottle and shook what was left. “I just watched you.”

“Kill Hendriks, I mean. That wasn’t mine.”

“How’d you find out the cops wanted you for it?”

“Seen them watching the hotel yesterday. They didn’t see me. I went down an alley. After that I went—”

“For a walk. Don’t tell me where. So far I can beat the harboring rap. Where were you yesterday morning?”

“At the Alamo. You seen me there.”

“Before that.”

“I was there all morning till you came with that St. George.”

“St. Charles. Where’d you go after I left?”

“Mt. Elliott Cemetery. I was meeting somebody.”

“Who?”

“A woman.”

“The one whose call you were expecting?”

“Yeah. She didn’t show.”

“Name.”

“I don’t know. She called before, said she had the money Hendriks owed me and not to tell nobody. She was scared of him finding out. Said she’d call back to set up the meet. She did, after you left.”

“Anybody see you there?”

“Some bums. I walked. I waited two hours and then I gave up and went home. That’s when I seen the cops sitting outside waiting.”

“You should’ve told me.”

“She said not. I didn’t want to scare her off.”

“You couldn’t scare her if you’d walked in with your head under your arm.”

“You know who it was?”

“I know someone wanted you someplace where no reliable witnesses could place you at the time Alfred Hendriks was killed. That’s twice in twenty years you’ve had a frame hung on you the same way. Didn’t Marquette teach you anything?”

“They got some bad dudes inside,” he said. “I thought they got them all.”

“They don’t make that much barbed wire.”

He sat down then. He was wearing the clothes I’d seen him in the day before. “So what’d you find out?”

“The good news is I found someone who can pin Hendriks to the robbery.”

He watched me and said nothing. That’s the trouble with good news-bad news jokes; they depend too much on who’s listening. I gave up. “He won’t come forward. He’d only implicate himself. But I know who killed Hendriks. If I work it right I can get you clear of that.”

“What about the money?”

“The money’s gone. Forget the money. If I had the money right now I’d use that fan to blow it out the window and watch the traffic back up. The trouble with you, besides being too damn big, is you think because they dressed you up like a citizen and let you through the gate you’re out of prison. You’re not, as long as you keep worrying about what you’ve got coming to you.”

“So what do we do now?”

“I’m going to go talk to Hendriks’ killer. You’re going to turn yourself in if you don’t want to wind up dead on a sidewalk because you didn’t hear a cop tell you to throw up your hands the first time.”

“You going to turn me in if I don’t?”

“You bet. I’ll hit you on the head with this desk and wrap you in the rug like Cleopatra and carry you there under one arm. Let the cops do their own job if you won’t.”

“Well, I won’t.”

“I never thought you would. Sit tight.” I picked up the telephone.

“Who you calling?”

I was dialing. “Relax. Does this look like nine-one-one?”

“What’s nine-one-one?”

“Sí?”
A woman’s voice.

“Elda?” I said.

“Sí.”

“This is Mr. Walker. I almost had lunch there yesterday.

“Sí.”

“Is either Mr. or Mrs. Marianne at home?”

“No.”

At least it was a change. “Where’s Mr. Marianne?”

“He say downriver.”

“What’s he doing at the plant on a Sunday?”

“Meeting, he say. About
Señor
Hendriks.”

“What about Mrs. Marianne?”

“Exercise. She run.”

This was getting to be like pulling boxcars. “When do you expect her back?”

“No sé.”

“Can you take a message?”

“
Sí
.” Paper rustled.

“Tell her I know who killed Hendriks. I’m going to see her husband about it now.”

I made sure she had it, then depressed the plunger. I let it up and dialed again. This call was quicker. I didn’t use any names.

“I’m coming along,” DeVries said.

“I figured you would. You’ll have to scrunch down in the back seat in case we pull up alongside any prowl cars at traffic lights.”

“It wouldn’t be anything like I ain’t been doing since yesterday.”

I took the West German revolver George St. Charles had given me out of the drawer and slapped it down in front of him. “If you get caught with this maybe they’ll let us be roommates. Use your left hand and keep it away from your face if you have to fire it. My advice is don’t. These days the Krauts make better cars than they do guns.”

He picked it up and examined it, then stood and stuck it inside his pants, pulling his shirttail out to cover the butt.

“Where’s yours?”

“Collecting rust in the property room at thirteen hundred. I’ll use the Luger.” I got up. “You won’t mind if we swing west to pick someone up.”

“Guy you just called?”

“That’s the one.”

“Who is he?”

“The cop who arrested you.”

He met us at the door, buttoning up a black nylon shirt with white orchids on it. He had on gray flannel trousers and his feet were shod in black high-tops with brass hooks and steel toes. His scalp gleamed through his short bristly pinkish hair, but he looked younger than he had relaxing in the backyard with his wife and grandchildren, the air was charged, as if a big jet had just passed over, or maybe it was the situation. “Come ahead in,” he said. “I’m just — ” He saw my client looming behind me.

“Floyd Orlander, Richard DeVries,” I said. “You might remember each other.”

“Lieutenant.”

Orlander looked at me. “He still wanted?”

“If he weren’t I would’ve called the cops instead of you.”

“If you told me he was in it I would of said no.”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

He hadn’t moved from the doorway. “In the old days I played nice sometimes with pimps and stickup guys. I had to to get what I was after. Not with pushers or killers, though. Never once. I’m not about to break a perfect record just because I’m retired.”