Downriver (11 page)

He spread the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and pointed at the web of flesh between them. “See that scar? Well, maybe you can’t so good anymore. Back in ’sixty-two this snitch we was questioning kind of hard behind the old Demosthenes Bar pulled a .45 and stuck it in Barney’s stomach and squeezed off. The punk just never carried, we weren’t ready for it. There wasn’t time to do anything but jam my hand into the action.

After that we sent the sorry snitch to Receiving to get his jaw wired. I saved Barney’s cookies that night.”

“Wouldn’t that make him loyal to you instead of the other way around?”

“Hell no, it made him even more miserable to be with. But you give a man back his life, you just naturally want to hang around and make sure he doesn’t throw it away. I guess he’s grateful out there in the Piss-Your-Pants Home for the Terminally Fucked in Pasadena or wherever it is. Sorry, Dottie.”

“You do the explaining when we send these children home swearing like muleskinners.”

He didn’t hear her. He was looking at the twins, and his thoughts were as clear as the welts on his face. I said, “If they’re raised right they won’t stick you in a place like that.”

“Five minutes alone with my department piece, that’s all I’ll ever ask them for.”

He put on his hat. It was a dismissal, but I wasn’t ready to leave the spot. The sun felt good on my stiff neck. “City looking to expand the airport?”

“Three years now. I’m the one standing in front of it. I bought this place out of my pension, cash on the barrelhead. First place we ever owned. They’ll meet my price or ’doze us both under.”

“What’s your price?”

“Sixty-five.”

“You might get it. In Detroit they’d just invoke eminent domain and roll right over you.”

“It’s why I left. That it?”

I hesitated. “I’m curious about that shoot-out in Judge Lorenzo’s court. It’s not my business.”

“Was I really trying to hit him?”

“That’s the question.”

“That little pimp. You know what he’s doing now? Handling palimony suits for celebrity fags. I should of took aim.”

“I appreciate your time,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah. Good-bye.”

Mrs. Orlander started to get up, but I said I knew the way out. She showed me her dentures. Whatever she’d overheard was nothing on what she’d been hearing for decades. As I turned toward the house, a wrestling match started up in the sandbox. Orlander said if it didn’t stop right now he’d twist some heads off. The boy laughed.

I
T WAS THE DAMNEDEST
case, and knowing where to find the man I had been paid to look for was no help. It was like one of those game shows where they give you the answer and you have to come up with the question. I took the Edsel Ford eastbound into Detroit, eating cool air coming in through the windows and listening to the not-so-distant sound of Richard DeVries’s twenty-year fuse burning low. It sounded just like a big black jet waiting its turn at the runway in Floyd Orlander’s backyard.

Exiting the expressway, I found myself pointed south and kept going. That way lay knowledge. Most of what little I knew about the case had revealed itself while I was moving in that direction. It was a deal more tidy than sacrificing farm animals.

Downriver is a mystical name to most Detroiters, as the New World was to Europeans in the sixteenth century; a place where dragons drank the blood of mariners and pretty women sat in their underwear on rocks, plucking at lyres and waiting for ships to sail too close. Geographically it refers to a collection of bedroom communities strung out south of the city on the U.S. side of the international border, factory towns with dirty air and clean streets protected by lamps and the cyclops eye of the Neighborhood Watch. Some of the communities have French names to remind their neighbor to the north of the explorers who brought the world to the bend in the river that the Indians called the Crooked Way. But it’s a wasted effort, because the city is barely aware of its satellites, and everything it doesn’t understand it calls downriver.

Civilized gray smoke was leaning from the stacks of the old tractor plant-turned high tech automotive center when I swung through the opening in the chainlink fence. No guard appeared, so I rolled on until I found a space in the dozens of rows of parked vehicles with security stickers on their windshields and got out. The pavement was spongy in the late-afternoon heat and made little smacking sounds when I lifted my feet.

A red-painted fire door bore the legend
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
in yellow stencil. I pulled it open. Inside, a guard in a gray uniform looked up from the sandwich he was eating behind a library table. A fan with a white plastic housing blew hard-boiled egg odor at me.

“Security badge,” he said, spitting bits of egg-white. He was a hard-looking number with graying hair and black eyebrows and a neck like a pork butt. His revolver rode high on his hip with its black rubber grip showing above the table.

I let him see my ID. “Mr. Piero in the Detroit office said to use his name.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“He gives out his name like I give out hundred-dollar bills. Offices or plant?”

“Offices.”

He reached into a corrugated box full of colored Lucite tags on the table and held out a blue one. “Hang that on your pocket and take the elevator down the hall. No detours.”

It was stamped with a large white numeral twelve. I clipped it to my handkerchief pocket and followed a narrow hallway covered in painted corkboard to a single elevator. There were no buttons for individual floors inside, just
UP
and
DOWN
. When the doors opened to let me out I made room for a brunette in a peach-colored business suit, who glanced at my tag.

“I used to be a thirteen,” I said.

She was turning that over when the doors sealed us off from each other. Anyway it beat finding myself in the middle of a brawl.

It was one of those fast-food offices with three women behind a reception counter and rows of waist-high partitions opposite it with desks between them and men and women working like ants at the desks. I asked for Alfred Hendriks.

“When is your appointment?” The woman who responded was at the other end of the counter from the one I’d addressed. She had silver-rinsed hair and rimless glasses and looked over her shoulder at me from a cabinet where she was filing something. I recognized her quality-controlled voice from the telephone that morning. I said I didn’t have an appointment and told her my name.

She turned her head away. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hendriks is out.”

“Would he be in if I said I’m from Stutch Petrochemicals?”

“Are you?”

“No. I tried it before. It can’t work twice. When will he be in?”

“He didn’t say. You can wait if you like.”

I took a seat and flipped through a glossy copy of something called
Modem Aerodynamics.
It had a cartoon page but the jargon was out of my reach. I laid it aside and lit a cigarette.

I had been there ten minutes when a woman entered from another hallway and stopped before the counter. She was tall and slender and had on a suit that looked as if it had been designed for a whole different kind of business from those I’d been looking at. It was satin, for one thing, and a shade of blue you don’t usually see in offices this side of Las Vegas. Her hair was shoulder-length and deep auburn — it would be red in sunlight — her complexion fair, and she had high cheekbones accentuated by hollows and Mongol eyes helped along with a breath of mascara at the corners. They didn’t need help.

“Is my husband in?” Her voice hung somewhere around the middle register and reminded me for some reason of magnolias and Georgian columns. I’d never been to Georgia and didn’t know either of them from asparagus.

“Go right in, Mrs. Marianne,” said the receptionist with the glasses. “He’s expecting you.”

She walked past me, heels snicking, and around the counter, where a hallway swallowed her up. The place was lousy with hallways. I smelled a spring night for several minutes after I lost sight of her.

I smoked another cigarette and listened to the room. A woman called the
Free Press
to add something to a full-page advertisement she’d placed earlier for tomorrow’s edition. A man complained to someone on the telephone that his middle initial was missing from a nameplate he’d ordered. Two guys laid bets over the partition separating them on that night’s game with New York. The woman called back the
Free Press
to cancel the advertisement. It was a going office.

The redhead in the blue suit came out of the hallway behind the counter and left the way she’d come. She hadn’t learned to walk the way she did watching Aunt Pittipat.

I got up and leaned on the counter by the woman with the glasses. “ That Timothy Marianne’s wife?”

“Yes.”

“She looks like a model.”

“She was.” She folded her arms atop her workspace. If she had on make-up behind the granny lenses it was strictly basic. She was younger than she tried to appear. “They met at the auto show when he was with Ford. He took her off the hood of a brand new Thunderbird. I thought everyone knew that story. It was in
People
and everything.”

“I guess I was wasting my time with
Billy Budd
that week. Do you need those?”

She touched the glasses. “Only to see with. Why?”

“You ought to try contact lenses. Green ones. And shampoo that tinsel out of your hair. What are you really, twenty, twenty-two?”

“Twenty-five. And you’re out of bounds.”

“Just restless. Mr. Hendriks get in?”

“You didn’t see him, did you?”

“I figured there was a back way. You know, like Al Capone had.”

“Who?”

“He was an Italian saint. Forget him. Might Mr. Marianne be free?”

“When is your appointment?” She’d turned on the deep freeze.

“We did that already. Tell him it’s about his general manager, Alfred Hendriks. And an old robbery-murder.”

The room got quiet, or maybe it just seemed that way because all three of the receptionists were looking at me. After a moment, Specs lifted the receiver off her intercom and flipped a switch.

“W
HAT YOU SAID
out there was textbook character assassination,” said Timothy Marianne. “If Al doesn’t sue it sure won’t be because his lawyer told him he had a weak case.”

I said, “My assets include a bottle of Scotch and one of those kitchen knives with a fifty-year guarantee. He can have the Scotch but I need the knife. I might want to cut my throat someday.”

He made a noise halfway between a grunt and a chuckle. We were sitting in his office, which wasn’t nearly as big as you’d expect it to be, especially in a building constructed from his own plans. He had a good view of the river and of Fighting Island behind his desk, but except for the antiques and a hardwood floor you could skate on, the room might have belonged to any corporate vice president in town. His big tufted chair was tipped back as far as it would go and he had one of his Thom McAns cocked up on a corner of the desk. It shared the gold leather top with a pen set, a telephone intercom, and a fiberglass model of the Stiletto the size and approximate shape of a bedpan.

“I learned something of the private investigation business when my first wife was divorcing me,” he said. “Even the sleaziest of them hang out with lawyers too much to think they can get away with slandering a big gun in front of witnesses. What’ve you got?”

“A client who says Hendriks buffaloed him into providing cover for an armored car robbery in 1967. And something Hendriks told me when I spoke to him on the telephone this morning, which I’ll go into later. Just now I’d like to discuss how he came to be with you.”

“Shouldn’t you ask him that?”

“I would if he didn’t hide under his desk every time I try to talk to him. He’s got that in-a-meeting and out-to-lunch line down cold.”

“He’s busy. We all are.” He rolled the Stiletto model forward and back two inches with his toe. He was an angular six feet, slumped almost horizontal in a blue suit that looked as if it had fallen off a truck and he had picked it up and put it on and come straight there. No matter how good his tailor, the careless way he sat and moved would have any suit looking just like it in half an hour. His shoulders were high and narrow, his neck long, his face not as big as it seemed at first because I had been seeing it in newspapers and on television for a couple of years. It was long, tan, and rugged and his brows were darker than his hair, which was clipped short around the thin spots and left long where it was full to play down the retreat. I liked him, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the suit.

“You mentioned murder,” he said.

“One of the robbers was killed. The cops think he was shot by a partner.”

“You think the partner was Al Hendriks?”

“What I think isn’t part of the package. My client thinks Hendriks set him up to take the fall. If he’s right, Hendriks got away clean with two hundred thousand cash. How much has he got invested in Marianne Motors?”

“Not two hundred thousand to start, although his holdings are worth twenty times that now. He was among my first backers when I left Ford to start my own firm. I took him with me out of the accounting pool there. Al’s the best man with numbers I’ve ever seen. If he wanted to steal he could have stolen far more without ever leaving his desk.”

“He wasn’t an accountant yet when the armored car job went down. About when did he start working at Ford?”

“I don’t know. I’d been aware of him for some time when he asked to join the team. He’d run figures for me sometimes as a favor. It was both our jobs if the brass found out. That was eight long years ago. If I’d known how long it would take ...” He played with the model car some more.

“None of the stolen bills ever turned up, according to the cops,” I said. “It takes time to launder that much dirty money. Years sometimes, and then you only get a few cents on the dollar. Meanwhile he had to live. When the cash did come through he couldn’t spend it all right away. Your venture might have come along just at harvest time.”