Downriver (22 page)

“I got as close as I’m ever likely to get to a confession from Sherman Miskoupolis that his family turned around the money from that armored job for Alfred Hendriks. Hendriks killed Davy Jackson. Not DeVries.”

“Sherman Miskoupolis, of the Miskoupolis brothers?”

“I hope there’s just the one family. The name’s too hard to pronounce.”

“I met Ari one time and I helped investigate after they scraped Nick off the pavement in Greektown. It should of happened to all three of them. Anyway I was talking about the Hendriks kill.”

“He didn’t do Hendriks either. We’re on our way to meet the killer. You coming or not? You said you wanted to see this through.”

“Who’s the killer?”

“You didn’t pay to see that hand.”

“Man, I hope you know how lucky you are I mellowed.” He made chewing motions with his big jaw. Then he looked up at DeVries. “You got bald.”

“You got old,” DeVries said.

“Old’s better than bald.”

“I can put on a hat.”

Orlander turned around and walked away from the door, leaving it open. DeVries and I went inside. In the dining room Orlander took a key down from the high top of an antique china cabinet and unlocked a drawer in the base.

“Where’s your wife?” I asked.

“I sent her to visit the kids. Said some old friends from the department were coming and the language could get unrefined.”

“She buy it?”

“Not for a damn second. But she went.” He took a glistening brown leather rig out of the drawer and climbed into it. “Ever wear one of these?” He snapped the bottom of the holster to his belt and adjusted the elastic strap across his back.

“Years ago. Felt like a goiter.”

“Still does. But those belt clips are hell on the kidneys. What are you carrying?”

I showed him the Luger. I’d put on my jacket to conceal it.

“Shit. That Fred Flintstone action’s what lost them the war. Here’s a gun.” He lifted the top off a pasteboard box in the drawer and picked up a square black automatic pistol with a checked grip.

“Nine-millimeter,” I said. “Lieutenant Alderdyce said you had a smaller Beretta.”

“Never heard of him. That seven-sixty-five was too light. Almost got me killed once.” He popped the magazine, looked at the cartridges, heeled it back in, and racked one into the chamber. He holstered the weapon. “Dottie wants me to get rid of it on account of the kids. Women teaching kids to be scared of guns is what’s got this world in deep shit. What’s King Kong carrying? Don’t tell me he just wears his shirts sloppy.”

I said, “You don’t want to see it.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

“That’s the trouble with this place. Nobody’s got no pride. Where we headed?”

“The Marianne plant.”

“How you figure to get past Security?”

“I thought I’d wing it. It’s not that great there.”

“They see you before?”

“Just once.”

“That’s plenty. Wait here.” He went through the dining room arch.

DeVries stood around looking big and quiet. I asked him how he was doing.

“I got my description on every police radio in three counties and I’m standing in a white cop’s house. If I was doing much better I’d be in the gas chamber.”

“They don’t do that here. Yet. They’d give you a hundred years tops.”

“Hell, I’ll probably be dead by then.”

Orlander came back with a gray felt hat and stuck it out. “Pull this on.”

It was too big. I tucked the top half of an ear inside the crown and tugged the brim down over my right eye. Dick Tracy looked back at me from the glass in the china cabinet.

“Nothing changes a face like a hat,” Orlander said. “You be the mean one. If we do it right they won’t ask to see our shields.”

“We look kind of casual for cops.”

“How many neckties you see on Sunday? Plainclothes means plain clothes.”

“What do we put on DeVries?”

“DeVries stays in the car.”

“I don’t like splitting up.”

“We could have him go in on his hands and knees and tell them we’re with the Canine Corps.”

“I didn’t come this far to sit in no back seat,” the big man said.

“It’s how it gets done, junior.” Orlander pulled a thin green sweater on over the shoulder rig. “Otherwise it gets done without me. Which means it don’t get done.”

I said, “He’s right. They take one look at you and we’ll be up to our eyebrows in real cops.”

“Our eyebrows,” Orlander said. “Your ass.”

“We don’t need him.”

“We need him,” I said. “Last time we hit a Marianne office it was just the hired help. This time we’re dealing with the first string.”

“Ain’t nothing changed. It was the Man when I went in and it’s still the Man.”

Orlander stepped up to him. The top of his head came to DeVries’s sternum. “Don’t fuck with me, boy.”

“Don’t call me boy, fuck.”

“God bless us every one,” I said.

I
T WAS THE KIND
of Sunday afternoon that’s wasted on cities, custom-built for chicken and dumplings after church and playing checkers on the front porch. The sun was Crayola yellow in a scrubbed sky with chunky clouds lying on it as motionless as old men in a park. Buildings floated on layers of rippling heat. The skyline was sharp at the edges, as if cut out with a steel punch, and the pavement made sucking sounds as our tires rolled over it.

We took the Edsel Ford east from Romulus and turned south on the John Lodge past the empty haunted skeletons of Wonder Bread and Vernor’s, putting more distance between ourselves and chicken and dumplings every block. On West Jefferson the river caught the light in little platinum bursts, reminding me of Lake Superior as seen from Marquette. We drove along entire streets without meeting another car. Short of an air raid, nothing empties a city faster than a nice weekend.

Floyd Orlander rode with his window cranked down and his eyes on the road ahead, flicking them to the side only to note each street sign automatically as we passed it. His brutal profile never stirred. DeVries lay hunched on the floor of the back seat. Every time he moved to relieve a cramped muscle, my seat strained forward. The little Renault labored under the extra weight.

“I don’t get this Hendriks at all,” Orlander said, when we were stopped for a light in River Rouge. There was no traffic going in either direction. “My old man carried car batteries up and down three flights of stairs for twenty years. I had to get a job to finish high school. If I had an economics scholarship to England I sure wouldn’t hit no armored car.”

“Bet you would for two hundred large,” DeVries said.

“Too much risk. And he couldn’t know there was that much. The guards stretched their route that day to cut down on the number of trips.”

“It wasn’t just the money.” The light changed and I crossed the intersection. “Some people are honest because they’re honest. Just as many or maybe more never do anything dishonest because they don’t get the chance or they’re afraid they’ll get caught. You’re a college kid pulling down a buck and a half an hour doing the books in a print shop and it’s fine until the dam bursts. DeVries said it: Everyone around you is breaking the law, smashing and burning and boosting merchandise and the cops are letting it happen for the most part because it’s gotten too big for them. Then your boss tells you to tot up the accounts because he’s shipping them out tomorrow in a lot with every other business in the neighborhood. It’s the money, but not just that. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and you’ve got at least twenty-four hours to decide what you’ll do with it.”

“I never bought that help-a-good-boy-go-bad shit.”

“Nobody does. There’s no such thing as corrupting a person. There has to be a foothold to begin with. Hendriks was a firecracker waiting to go off, though maybe he never knew it. So was DeVries, only in a different way. One robbed, the other burned. The rules were suspended and the opportunity was there.”

“Wasn’t the same at all,” DeVries said. “I was drunk and black.”

Orlander said, “Bullshit. Your kind gets a boil on your ass, it’s because you’re black.”

“You ever been?”

“No. I got a boil just the same.”

“Don’t it give you a headache?”

“Fellas.” I passed a line of bicyclists in helmets pedaling along the shoulder. “Hendriks was drunk too, in his way. People who work with money love it. They’ll say it’s figures they love, but take away the dollar sign and they lose interest in a fat hurry. But it’s the sixties and love and peace are supposed to be more important. You’ve got a hippie girlfriend who believes it, or pretends to, and anybody who’s been force-fed that wall-poster philosophy along with the usual hallucinogens is a ready tool. Maybe you tell her you’ll give the money to some cult group or a Democrat.

“Davy Jackson you handle a little differently. He’s drunk almost as often as he’s black, and a big heist under those circumstances is just another way of Getting His. He’s like DeVries that way.”

“Reason enough for DeVries to be in on it,” Orlander said.

“Go to hell.”

“Not near enough,” I said. “He’s got a shot at professional basketball and he’s engaged to be married. If the first doesn’t change your perspective, the second sure does. I’ve seen you with your grandchildren and I know you know what I’m talking about. But he’s drunk and black too, so him you take in partway and don’t tell him the rest. You play him the way you play the girlfriend and Jackson, only with different pieces. Hendriks was the only one in the game with all the pieces. In a little over a year, two of the others were dead and the third was in prison. Hendriks quit winners.”

“Until yesterday,” said Orlander.

“That’s the trouble with winning. There’s always a challenger.”

The gate was open, the employee parking lot filled. There are no Sundays in the automobile industry either. I steered around the building and parked in the little lot off the executive entrance. Timothy Marianne’s Stiletto was there, with a plate reading
TIMTOP
. There was no sign of Mrs. Marianne’s car.

“How many on the desk?” Orlander asked.

“Just one in front,” I said. “Back here I don’t know. I didn’t go in this door.”

“I’ll talk. You snarl every little.” He opened his door.

DeVries winched himself up onto the back seat, filling the rearview mirror. “What do I do, sit here and play the radio?”

“Slide down if any other cars show up,” I said. “Wait for whoever it is to get inside, then lay on the horn.”

“Who you expecting?”

“A good-looking redhead driving a maroon Turbo Saab.”

“What the hell’s a Turbo Sob?”

“You’ll know it when you see it.” I put a foot on the pavement.

“I ain’t sitting here all day counting license plates.”

“Give us twenty minutes. Otherwise wait for a signal. Then come in hard, but don’t kill anyone.”

“Twenty minutes is a long time.”

“Not compared to twenty years.”

The steel fire door looked like the one on the employees’ entrance in front. This one was locked. Orlander squashed the button on an intercom mounted next to it.

“Yes?” A masculine, radio-modulated voice. They’ve developed most of the tinniness out of closed-circuit communication.

“Open up.”

“Whom do you represent?”

Orlander looked at me. “Did he say
whom?”

“Yeah. Let’s make him eat it.”

“Whom do you represent?” the voice repeated.

“The next forty-eight hours of your life, junior, if you don’t open up before we shoot off the lock. That’s the standard drop for interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty.”

“You’re the police?”

“Man’s got a lot of questions,” Orlander said.

“Let’s throw him in with some fag bikers.”

“I don’t think we got any.”

“We’ll arrest some,” I said.

“Hang on,” said the voice.

A buzzer razzed. Orlander turned the knob and we went inside. The guard was sitting in front of six television screens on a console. He was my age, trim, and tall-looking in a gray uniform with the tie tucked inside his shirt. He wore steel-rimmed aviator’s glasses and a revolver in a spring clip on his hip.

“Lookit the soldier suit,” I said.

He was staring at Orlander. “You’re kind of old for a police officer.”

I said, “He got gray watching me bounce cheap rentals off the ceiling.”

“Shut up. Where’s your boss, junior?”

“The security chief?” He adjusted his glasses. “He’s not—”

“I mean the big kahuna. Where is he?”

“Mr. Marianne?”

Orlander looked at me. “He’s just as dumb in person.”

“He’ll smarten up when those bikers start getting friendly.”

“Bwana Marianne, junior. The chairman of the board. The head honcho. The high colonic. The jerk that owns this building and your brass buttons. It’s about his general manager that got himself dead yesterday. You read about it after the funnies.”

“He doesn’t read,” I said. “He cleans his gun and thinks about Clint Eastwood.”

The guard colored. “There’s no reason —”

I took a step forward and ran into Orlander’s arm. “Tear him up on your own time,” he said. “You got your job, junior, we got ours. Just point us his way and we’ll be out of your life like last year’s calendar.”

“He’s on the floor, talking to the employees.”

“You wouldn’t be just telling us that so you can call up to his office and tell him we’re coming,” Orlander said.

“See for yourself.”

Marianne’s lanky, loosely clad frame slouched on one of the
TV
monitors with his hands in his pockets, facing a crowd of coveralled men from a low catwalk over a conveyor. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in a while, but it could have been the black-and-white photography. There was no sound.

“Where might that be, junior?”

“Through there.” The guard pointed at a pair of swinging doors with square grilled windows. “You’ll need these.”

Orlander snatched the yellow Lucite tags off the guard’s palm and gave me one. We put them in our pockets.

“They’re supposed to be worn on the outside.”

“It’s okay, junior. We’re plainclothesmen.”

At the doors I turned around, went back to the console, and pulled the telephone out of the wall. It took two yanks. I handed the frayed end of the cord to the guard. “Charge it to the city.”