Downriver (23 page)

“What about your badges?” he said.

The doors swung to behind us.

“Fucking ham,” said Orlander.

“Don’t blame me,” I said. “Your good cop is most cops’ bad cop.”

We were in a corridor done in yellow tile without a window or door on either side. There was another set of swinging doors at the other end with red letters on a white sign reading
SAFETY GLASSES BEYOND THIS POINT
. Timothy Marianne’s voice droned on the other side. We pushed through into the plant proper.

T
HIS SECTION WAS ONE
of the few remaining from the old tractor plant. Thick mullioned windows the size of garage doors lined the walls from just below the twenty-foot ceiling to within eight feet of the floor. Between them was bare brick, with exposed girders crisscrossing overhead and a freshly poured concrete floor going white in mottled patches. A railed catwalk six feet high circled the walls, stepped ladders on all four sides leading down from them to the floor, where a row of Stiletto chassis stood on a stopped conveyor belt. Space-age robot limbs posed along the belt with their drills, torches, and high-speed sanders pointed ceilingward like weapons at parade rest. In the aisles between the belt and the catwalks, fifty or sixty workers in gray coveralls stood looking up at Timothy Marianne slouched behind the railing.

“... died while at work for the company he did so much to help build,” he was saying. “Why he died isn’t our concern. What is our concern is that we continue to work together as we have from the beginning to ensure that the dream he gave his life for becomes fact. It’s as much of a monument as Al would care to have, and greater than most.”

At his side and a little behind him hovered a large black man in coveralls with his hands on his hips and his head down, listening. He’d be the foreman. Orlander and I had come out onto a catwalk adjoining theirs, angled across from them. Our path was blocked by a white vinyl-covered kitchen chair with steel tubing where the foreman probably sat when the conveyor was moving. Rather than call attention to ourselves by moving it we stayed where we were.

“I know there are rumors among you already that Al was into something that got too big for him,” Marianne said. “None of them has any foundation. From the beginning he invested his time and skills and most of his personal finances into this plant and the great mechanism behind it. Put simply, without Al Hendriks there would be no Marianne Motors. I can’t stop the speculation, but I won’t have him tried and condemned because he had the temerity to be killed in a violent age.

“Many of you are wondering about the future of Marianne Motors. You are its future. Which direction it takes is entirely up to you. As long as you and those who come after you continue to show the dedication and loyalty you have so far, the firm will go on. And now I’ve kept you from your work long enough.”

There was a little silence after he finished. Then someone clapped and someone else took it up and applause crackled through the crowd. It rose when Marianne lifted his right hand in his characteristic wave and died quickly as he turned to leave. At its peak it wouldn’t have drawn a second curtain call at the Fischer Theater. At the labor level, pep talks are followed by pink slips too often to get excited about.

Marianne stopped when he saw us. “How did you get past Security?”

“What Security?” Orlander said. “Captain Video in the back room?”

“Who are you?”

Whatever answer he might have made was drowned out when the conveyor started with a report like a pistol shot. Then the robots with drills and sanders and welding torches cut in, sparks splattered, and the air grew sharp with the stench of scorched metal. The foreman had gone down to supervise the startup. I raised my voice. “There someplace we can talk without yelling?”

“Say what you have to say right here. I have a business to put back together.”

“I thought the Hendriks kill wasn’t no more than pissing in Niagara,” Orlander said.

“Who is he?” Marianne asked me.

“A friend. You throw a stirring rally. Things that bad?”

“Unless you’re a stockholder I don’t see that it’s your business.”

“I know who killed Hendriks.”

“Take off that hat. You don’t look the least bit like Harrison Ford.”

I’d forgotten I was wearing it. I removed it and tossed it onto the seat of the foreman’s chair. It hadn’t been needed anyway. Marianne came around the corner and stopped on the other side of the chair. “Who?”

“You should have asked that right away,” I said. “I might have believed you didn’t know.”

“I know, all right. It was your client. You’re hiding him, I suppose.”

“We’re not talking about DeVries and you know it. That bewildered air doesn’t cut it anymore. You’re too shrewd a businessman not to suspect the real killer.”

He put his hands back in his pockets. “Suppose you explain.”

“It’s all craft. The neglected hair and clothes, the careless posture, the outward appearance of boyish innocence; that whole inverted corporate polish is obvious enough to fool the business world, but cops are used to obvious ploys. They’d see through it the way a kid sees through a professional magician. It’s a weapon against nonliteral minds, just like Commodore Stutch’s age. You know, all right.”

Orlander said, “
I
don’t.”

“Every case needs a place to start,” I said. “After I’d heard enough of DeVries’s story to buy it I started on Hendriks. Prison’s a little like going blind. The last thing you see before you get cut off stays with you. Years later he recognized Marianne’s general manager in a photograph as the Wayne State student who encouraged him to throw that firebomb.” I looked at Marianne. “The second time Hendriks stonewalled me, in your office, I followed him to your house and saw him pick up your wife and drive away with her.”

He laughed easily. “So I found out they were having an affair and killed him. How Napoleonic.”

“I can see she told you about it after I confronted her. I thought she would. It might have been anything or nothing. Extramarital flings among couples at your social level aren’t exactly special bulletins. When Hendriks turned up dead the next day, a lazy cop might have made jealousy the motive and gone after you. It was too much coincidence for me.

“Setting that aside, I had to consider the possibility that my client killed Hendriks. That stuck me square in the middle. If I proved DeVries’s story I established a motive. His alibi, that a woman who wouldn’t identify herself called him to set up a meeting to arrange a payoff and then didn’t show, stunk. The murder fit him too well so I set that aside too.”

“Your logic is selective,” Marianne said. Smoke from the abraded metal on the line enveloped his legs. We were standing directly under one of the ventilators mounted above the windows.

“That left Hendriks’ second set of books. It pointed to any one of a number of multinational corporations he’d been fleecing, including the ancient and malevolent firm of Icepick & Garrote. Not that any of the higher profiles on Wall Street would be squeamish about murder either. They finance wars and foreign assassinations. A little domestic snuffing would come under the heading of minor adjustments.”

“You’re lying. Al was a lot of things but he wouldn’t have sold out the company.”

“Two point eight times,” I said, “according to an accountant I had look at the two computer disks Hendriks had squirreled away. But in my business, evidence that comes that easy is automatically tainted. SOP in that situation is to look in the opposite direction.”

Orlander said, “So far you’ve eliminated every suspect but DeVries.”

“Not every one. Someone’s still unaccounted for. Let’s go back twenty years. We know, or we suspect, that Hendriks and Davy Jackson pulled off the actual heist of that armored car on Brady in 1967. DeVries torched the empty building to create a diversion, although he didn’t know that’s what he was doing. That leaves the wheel man. Hendriks would have had one. He was too practical to leave the getaway car unguarded in the middle of a riot.”

“The broad,” Orlander said.

“His girlfriend, Frances Souwaine, was a fellow student at Wayne State. She had priors for soliciting and possession of narcotics, which was part of the pattern back then, especially for an Alabama girl trying to make her way in the big northern city after the death of her parents. DeVries said she was a hippie. She looked like one and she was living with a man outside of wedlock and no doubt she had the standard things to say against the Establishment, but that prostitution record suggests she was more mercenary than the average run. So handling the wheel during the big caper wouldn’t have seemed out of line. We may never know what she thought when Hendriks gunned down one of his own men during the getaway, or if she was in on that part of the plan from the start, or if she even saw it. The reason we’ll never know is she was killed in an auto accident fifteen months later.”

Orlander said, “Hendriks?”

“I thought about it. Probably not. If he were going to take her out he wouldn’t have waited that long, and he might have been in England at the time. It could have been suicide. At least that’s what her sister thinks.”

Marianne kept his hands in his pockets. I’d been right about him. The tighter his situation the more casual he seemed.

“I looked up the accident,” I said. “ The newspaper account didn’t tell me as much as Frances Souwaine’s obituary in the same issue. She left only one survivor, a sister named Edith.”

“I suppose you got all hot and bothered over finding such a common name twice in one case,” Marianne said.

“Don’t knock hot and bothered. Sometimes it’s the only fuel you’ve got. Mrs. Marianne told me her sister was killed in an accident that may or may not have been deliberate on the sister’s part. It’s conceivable that two transplanted Southerners named Edith lost sisters in accidents. Two named Edith Souwaine is stretching it. That was your wife’s maiden name. I looked up the story on your wedding.”

“You sorry trash.”

“Her sister took part in the armored. Somewhere along the line she told Edith all about it, and then she killed herself on the road. It doesn’t much matter if it was conscious or unconscious. She had helped Hendriks commit robbery and been an accomplice to murder and then he left her here to bog down in that drugged Morning After that her kind woke up to in the sixties while he went to England. Maybe he planned to give her her cut; probably not. He’d already killed to sweeten his end. She couldn’t get to the money —it was with the Miskoupolis brothers getting scrubbed clean — and she couldn’t threaten to go to the cops because she was just as guilty. He used her up and threw her over and she worried at it until she’d worried herself to death. But Edith was stronger stuff.

“She could have turned him in; Frances was dead and safe from repercussions. She didn’t. Instead she put herself through a finishing course of some kind, shook the cottonseeds out of her hair, and became a model. She had the looks for it and more than her fair share of plantation charm. I’m not saying it was part of any master plan. More likely she was making her way after the example of her sister’s mistakes and watching for her opportunity second. It came when an escort from one of the auto companies who employed her as a model introduced her to you.”

He took his hands out of his pockets. It was starting to flake off now.

“She may have contrived that,” I went on. “She’d have been watching Hendriks’ stock rise since he took up with you, just as another of his victims would be later, in prison. Anyway she went to work, drawing on all that Southern heritage and Northern training, and before either of you was much older she became Mrs. Timothy Marianne. She must have especially enjoyed getting twenty percent of the corporation placed in her name. It made her Hendriks’ employer.”

“Edith loves me,” he said. “You just can’t accept that on its face. Your work’s too greasy.”

“No greasier than some of the people it rubs me up against. Just when your wife identified herself to Hendriks and put the squeeze on him to keep her from going public is one for the boys in the Securities and Exchange Commission. My guess is they’ll find out the pair were partners in Hendriks’ fast shuffle. It’s the only thing that explains why she took so long before claiming her final revenge.”

“No, Chester!”

“Watch it!” Orlander clawed under his sweater.

I ducked and something swished over my head. Then I turned inside the big foreman’s follow-through and chopped at his throat. It was a glancing blow. He grunted and brought the wrench back the other way. I threw up a forearm to block it. Orlander stuck the Beretta in Chester’s face and thumbed back the hammer. The wrench clanged to the catwalk.

“Kiss the floor, junior.”

After a moment the foreman got down in push-up position. He had seen the confrontation from below, understood that his employer was in some kind of trouble, and climbed a different ladder from the one he had descended, coming up on our blind side. Orlander lowered the automatic.

“You didn’t kill him, Mr. Marianne,” I said. “If you did you’d have let your man bash my head in.”

“You knew anyway.” His tone was barely audible above the noise from the floor. We had yet to attract any more attention from down there. Marianne’s whole frame had subsided, not so much relaxed now as crumpled in on itself. He looked his age.

I said, “I didn’t know how much you knew. I’m satisfied now you had no part in it. When Hendriks heard DeVries was out and paying me to ask questions about the robbery he got nervous. He went out driving with your wife that night to discuss a game plan. The jitters are contagious.

“The next day she invited me to lunch, letting you think it was your idea. She had more back-up plans than any of your people in engineering and design. She’d already called DeVries with a phony appointment to lure him someplace where he couldn’t establish an alibi. It had to be her. Who else knew enough about the case to convince him? With your business contacts and their political contacts it wouldn’t have been hard for her to find out where the state was putting him up. That was Plan B. If Plan A worked and I accepted your offer of cash or her offer of her — the cook coming in when she did to remind you of your errand downriver was perfect timing — the only thing lost would’ve been a couple more hours out of DeVries’s life. When she found out I wasn’t for sale for love or money she switched to the back-up.”