Downriver (24 page)

I took a second to swallow. Between having to speak above the racket and inhaling smoke and sparks, I was getting hoarse. No one jumped in to fill the pause.

“She pretended to be insulted and threw me out,” I said. “Actually she was in a hurry to get rid of me. If DeVries was going to be any use to her at all as a pigeon she had to get to the Detroit office of Marianne Motors and kill Hendriks before DeVries returned to his hotel.”

“No one would risk a murder conviction to cover up simple extortion,” Marianne said.

Orlander snorted.

I said, “It’s been done. But you’re forgetting her dead sister. Edith waited almost twenty years to repay that debt in full. Ask DeVries and a guy named George St. Charles what that’s like. The blackmail was just to make Hendriks squirm until she found an excuse to put him out of his misery. The possibility of his cracking made as good a one as any. Sooner or later there’d have been another if not that.”

“All right, except the last part.”

She hadn’t raised her voice above normal range and should have been drowned out by the machinery. Maybe it was the drawl. Orlander jumped and started to turn, raising the Beretta.

“Don’t.” Louder now. He stopped.

I did turn. She had come out onto the catwalk behind us. She had on a raw silk top, burlap-colored, with straps over her tanned shoulders, a flared yellow cotton skirt, and cork-soled sandals. Sparks flying up from the floor reflected off her thick red hair and off the oiled finish of the .38 revolver in her right hand.

I kept my hands away from my body. “What’d I get wrong?”

“Edith’s dead,” she said. “She died in 1968 at the end of a short innocuous life. I’m Frances Souwaine.”

“E
DITH —”
M
ARIANNE STARTED FORWARD.
She moved the gun. He stopped.

“I’m not Edith. I never was.”

“How’d you switch ID’s?” I asked.

“Put the gun on the floor,” she told Orlander. “Gently. We don’t want it falling off the edge and alerting personnel. Kick it this way.”

Orlander let down the hammer and complied. The Beretta scraped along the catwalk. She stopped it with a foot. Chester started to get up.

“Stay there.” She looked at me. The tilt of her eyes was feline. “My apartment house was gutted during the riots. I was living with Edith on Chalmers, if you can call it living. She wouldn’t have turned a dishonest dollar to keep from starving. The car was in my name. The police got the address off the registration and notified me. I identified her at the morgue, or rather I identified myself.”

“Why?”

“Why not? Frances Souwaine had a record. Edith Souwaine didn’t. Frances was an accomplice to an armed robbery and a murder that were still officially under investigation. Edith wasn’t carrying identification and we looked enough alike to be mistaken for each other by people who didn’t know us well, which no one did up here. She was between jobs. Of course the police had taken her fingerprints; but they hardly ever bother to process them when they’ve got a positive ID from the next of kin and no reason to suspect it. There wasn’t a good argument not to let Frances die and go on as Edith. I started thinking along those lines when the officer who called asked me if I knew Frances Souwaine. I worked out the rest in the cab on the way to the morgue.”

“No friend like a sister,” Orlander said. He kept his hands in sight as well.

“We barely spoke,” she said. “Our mother died delivering her and our father finally managed to drink himself to death when we were teenagers. In some families a thing like that brings the survivors closer together. Not us. The only thing we ever agreed on was to move up here, and even that was for different reasons. She wanted to support herself. I wanted everything. That meant education, and that took more money than I could make scrubbing toilets or answering telephones. Everything looked pretty far away in some of the filthy motel rooms I shared with filthier strangers an hour at a time. Drugs made it look a little closer. I got off them just in time for Edith, although it was already too late for Frances. Rest her soul.”

“How soon after that did you dye your hair?” I asked.

“I went to a beauty parlor the morning after I visited the morgue. I was straight by then and had some trick money saved up. Getting a breezy good-bye and a promise from Al to see me when he got back from abroad shocked me into doing something with myself. Some minor plastic surgery, breast implants, and a little weight gained in the right places changed my appearance a lot more than you might think. Modeling school did the rest. I met Al several times after I started seeing Tim. He never recognized me until I told him who I was. By then I was Mrs. Marianne.”

Marianne was shriveling. He looked nearly as old as the Commodore. “I love you.”

“You love the Stiletto. I was an option to help you charm investors into getting it off the drawing board and into production. Stop posing for once.”

The whine of the electric drills vibrated beneath our feet. Shifting my weight, I leaned closer to the foreman’s chair. “Was Hendriks getting set to talk?”

“He discussed paying you off. He brought it up during that car ride you made so much about. I knew when you didn’t accept my offer the next day that you’d keep at him until he broke.”

“You killed him.”

“Again, there was no good reason not to. Your client had made himself the perfect suspect. Failing that, there were all those investors Al had bilked into thinking they were buying original shares in Marianne. My percentage wasn’t on record. I made sure of that.”

“You were the one who put the disk in the computer,” I said.

“I read them both and put one back in Al’s desk. I didn’t want to make it too obvious. He couldn’t keep his access code a secret from me. Anyway the police couldn’t overlook something in the machine with the signal on hold. All those other suspects would confuse the issue just enough, stop the investigation from progressing beyond them and DeVries. I did that afterwards.”

“How’d you lure Hendriks into that elevator?”

“I was his partner, remember? I said we had to talk someplace where the watchman wouldn’t overhear us.”

“As the boss’s wife you’d know when the watchman would be on the other floor. You took an awful chance on his not hearing the shots.”

“Not really. You won’t find a room with better insulation than an elevator.”

“Or a noisy plant like this one,” Orlander said. “Pretty cold.”

She looked at him brightly. “It wasn’t as if I hadn’t done it before.”

I broke the silence. “You killed Davy Jackson?”

“He was too slow getting back to the car. Al was already in the passenger’s seat in front with the money. I shot Davy through the window. He shouldn’t have turned around to see if anyone was chasing him.”

“Hendriks in on it?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? To the end his style was to threaten a lawsuit or try to buy people off. It shocked hell out of him. I was high. If I’d been straight I might have known it would ultimately scare him away. At the time I thought it would bind us tighter.”

“How straight were you the night your sister died?” I almost had a hand on the chair.

“I didn’t rig the accident. An accident is just what it was. Letting people think it was suicide fit better with Frances Souwaine’s record. My record. Death clears up so very much.”

“Ours, for instance,” I said.

“Just yours and your friend’s. The police know you were harassing Hendriks. When you bulled your way in here and started on Tim, two armed men looking to shake him down — that’s no box lunch under your jacket—he was forced to shoot in self-defense. This is his gun. He was given a permit to carry it when some crank started making threatening phone calls to the house last year. You know perfectly well that’s the story you’ll tell, Tim. Marianne Motors could survive the investment scandal. The other would kill it.”

“What about Chester?” Orlander gestured at the foreman on the floor, who had started to make whimpering sounds.

“He got caught in the crossfire.”

“I guess we never did know each other,” Marianne said. “I won’t cover murder to make cars.”

“Sure you will. It’s your life. Such as it is.”

I threw the chair through the big window to my right. It took out a dozen panes, spraying glass glittering in the sunshine outdoors and turning heads along the assembly line below. Orlander’s reflexes were good for his age, but not good enough. She fired as he charged her. He staggered but kept going, hitting her arm and throwing wide her aim. Her second bullet struck sparks off a girder near the ceiling. She spun out of his path and he piled into the railing, losing steam now. Dark drops the size of pennies pattered on the catwalk.

The rest was confusion. Marianne hung suspended, unable to move or comprehend what was happening. I tore the Luger out from under my jacket, but Chester stumbled to his feet just then, blocking my view. Then the entire catwalk bounded under the loping tread of a giant and two great arms tore Edith Marianne — Frances Souwaine — off her feet and lifted her over the railing, the gun going off one more time, and free-threw her in a tall arc that ended in front of one of the robots’ welding torches six feet below. Her scream went on after the machinery had shut down.

When it ended she lay sprawled half-in and half-out of a Stiletto chassis with her skirt hiked up over her thighs and most of her face burned away. She wasn’t moving.

“You all right?” I asked DeVries.

He nodded. His skinhead flickered under the track lights. “I blowed the horn when she came in, but I guess you didn’t hear. I had some trouble with the guard. You said don’t kill him. You didn’t say nothing about not giving him a headache.”

“What happened to your gun?”

He pulled up his shirt to look at it. “Forgot I had it.”

I bent over Orlander, still hanging on to the railing with his other hand clutching his left side. The spots on the catwalk were blending into a puddle. “Where you hit?”

“I got shorter ribs than I took in here,” he grunted. “Shit.”

“Call an ambulance,” I told the foreman.

“I’ll last,” Orlander said. “Reason I said shit, I never got shot once in eighteen years with the department. I knew retirement was going to be this rough I never would of let them kick me off.”

Chester hadn’t moved. I started to tell him again to call an ambulance, but he was staring down at his employer. Mrs. Marianne’s last shot had made nearly as much of a mess of her husband’s face as the torch had of hers. But he was breathing. I left DeVries to take care of Orlander and made the call myself from the floor of the silenced plant.

I
WAS A ROBOT
in the Marianne plant, high-tech as all hell and I didn’t care who knew it. At the moment I was engaged in trying to weld Frances Souwaine’s face back together. I wasn’t making much progress, but that didn’t faze me because emotions weren’t a design feature. The bell rang, ending the shift. I lay there a while before I realized it was the telephone. I swung my feet to the floor — human feet, with sore arches — and sat in darkness, wondering where I was. Then I dug the empty Scotch bottle out of my back and remembered. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa in my living room.

The telephone kept ringing. As I lifted the receiver, the antique clock struck two.

“Walker?” The thin old voice had crack to spare. It was the beginning of his two-hour working day.

“Here, Commodore.”

“Raf gave me your message a few minutes ago. I need details.”

I gave him some. The whole thing had happened less than twelve hours ago and they were still sharp. There was complete silence on his end and for the third time in our acquaintance I wondered if he was dead.

Not dead, he said: “I must have those computer disks. Name your price.”

“I gave them to the police.”

“That was foolish.”

“It was that or jail on more charges than even you could afford to listen to over the telephone. The cops downriver take a dim view of Detroiters coming down committing trespass, assault and battery, borderline impersonation of police officers, and illegal discharge of a firearm inside city limits. The cops up here take just as dim a view of withholding evidence and harboring a fugitive. I split the disks up between the two departments. They can fight it out without me.”

“The company can declare bankruptcy and settle the claims for fifty million or so,” he said, thinking aloud. “As chairman of the board Marianne will have to answer fraud charges in his general manager’s absence. He can beat those. We’ll pull something out of this yet.”

“Marianne’s got other worries. Last I heard they were still working on removing that bullet from his brain.”

“I called the hospital. He’s out of surgery and in intensive care. Generally speaking, if you survive the operation under those conditions you’re already ahead of the odds. If nothing vital was destroyed he has a chance.”

“He won’t want it.”

“What of the officer, what’s his name, Orlander?”

“The bullet transfixed his side. They pinned his ribs together at General and sewed him up. He’ll be released in the morning. His wife and daughter and son-in-law and their two kids were coming into the building when I left. Generally speaking, if you survive visits from loved ones under those conditions you’re already ahead of the odds. Mrs. Marianne died more or less instantly,” I added, “ the pain and shock stopped her heart.”

“What about your client?”

Richard DeVries and I had parted company downriver, where the cops were holding him before turning him over to Detroit. Floyd Orlander and Chester, Marianne’s foreman, had agreed to provide statements corroborating mine on the subject of Frances Souwaine’s confession. The whole process would take forty-eight hours and then DeVries would be free.

I told him I’d take my fee for five days and expenses out of his retainer and send the rest to him at the Alamo. I’d asked him if he still wanted the two hundred thousand. He stroked his short beard.

“Yeah.”

“Get in line.”

“I’m used to it.” He shook my hand. There was nothing more anyone could teach him about that.