Downriver (2 page)

“I’m not sure I can find them.”

“I know where to start looking.”

“I thought you didn’t know anything about the robbery.”

“I didn’t at the time. But they turn the lights off here at nine o’clock and you get to think in the dark. About who put you up to what you done and why.” He turned his head up the coast in that pivoting motion. “There a library in town?”

“Libraries and museums up to your — well,
my
eyebrows,” I said. “Give me your bag, I’ll toss it in back.”

“Change of clothes and a razor.” He handed it to me. “And this.”

I looked at the check stretched between hrs hands. It was signed by the Michigan Secretary of State and made out to Richard DeVries in the amount of seven thousand dollars. “I guess you saved on haircuts.”

“And just about everything else. I don’t smoke, so I turned my cigarette allowance back into the inmate savings plan along with most of what they paid me to stamp license plates. Like if they didn’t I’d quit and go to work for the other place. You don’t need much to get along on in the house of doors. Room and board’s took care of.”

“It buys a month of my time. For finding the people you’re looking for, not for the other. And not if you’re planning to twist their heads off and dribble them into the Detroit River.”

“I’m a lousy killer. I walk around spiders. It makes me crazy but there you are. Got a pen?”

I produced one and he endorsed the back of the check and gave it to me. “What are you using to live on?”

“I was hoping you’d make me a loan against the seven large.”

I set his bag on the floor of the back seat and put the check in my wallet and counted out two hundred from the travel fund. When he closed his hand the bills disappeared. “I hope your cellmate wasn’t arrested for uttering and publishing,” I said.

“Marquette don’t believe in cellmates. I had a Detroit city councilman in Jackson, but they paroled him when he got reelected.”

We climbed into the car. I showed him how to adjust the seat to keep his chin off his knees and started the motor. “So how was prison?”

“Better than no sex at all.”

Don’t go by your dashboard compass when you get near the city of Marquette. It rests on a shelf of solid iron and in the old days, before modern mining processes made it easier to get ore out of hard-to-reach places in more temperate climates, the glow from the blast furnaces and from the kilns that made the charcoal that fueled them turned the harbor the color of blood. Today, scuttle-shaped carriers still ghost along the violet horizon lugging millions of tons of iron pellets bound for factories in Duluth and Detroit and Buffalo, but the railroads have gone to scrap and kindling and hydraulic machines have replaced most of the miners, whose shades still prowl the crooked shafts in hardhats and blackface. Wooden elevator towers doze on hilltops awaiting the beat of belt-driven machinery and jumbled curses in Swedish and Norwegian and German and Cornish, and everywhere you go in the perforated, grown-over countryside you hear the silent echoes of the gone.

I gassed up at a Best station layered between a rock shop and a combination mining museum and junk store and found DeVries grinning when I got back behind the wheel. “They let you pump your own?”

“It isn’t your choice. The friendly attendant with the uniform and bow tie is as dead as Elvis. Didn’t they let you watch TV?”

“I stopped when they took off
Gunsmoke.
Ain’t we supposed to buckle up or something?”

I showed him how to work his shoulder harness and strapped myself in. “They passed a law. For our protection. You’ll see surveillance cameras in public restrooms to protect us from perverts and police barricades to protect us from drunk drivers and dusk-to-dawn curfews to protect us from teenagers. You’ll think you never left the joint.” We pulled out into traffic.

He let it ride. “You got to remember what it was like in ’sixty-seven. The mayor was white, the cops was white. Malcolm X was dead. About the only place the brothers could hang out and get down was in the after-hours places, the blind pigs. When the fuzz busted that one at Twelfth and Clairmount it was like sticking a boil and the pus running out.”

“You were there?”

“Three blocks away in this white dude’s basement apartment, drinking Thunderbird. I came with Davy Jackson. The cat was a law student or something at Wayne State. I don’t remember how he knew Davy. Andrew something, or maybe it was Albert. We was wasted when we got there. He was living with this skinny dirty hippie blonde. They was toking and Davy and me was drinking and we heard glass breaking. We went out for a look-see and here’s this Tactical Mobile Unit going by with its rear window all cracked and pieces of busted glass all over the trunk. The brothers and sisters was on the sidewalk and in the street thick as bedbugs, yelling and throwing bottles. One just missed me and hit a streetlight and busted. I thought it was a bomb.”

“Speaking of bombs.”

“Not that night. People was running all over the place smashing windows and kicking in fenders. I went home when the sirens started. That was the end of it, I figured.

“Well, all hell’s still flying loose when I get home from the junkyard three days later. I was living in my mom’s old place on Sherman. She died when I was eighteen. Cancer. Anyway I been stacking car batteries all day, all I want to do is scrub off the crud and crash. Just as I get to the door Andrew or Albert comes cruising past in this rusty old Ninety-Eight with one door tied on and he sees me and stops and calls me over. The blonde’s with him, wasted again, or maybe still wasted from before. Next thing I know I’m in the back seat swigging Thunderbird and going to see the Man get it stuck to him.”

“You said Albert or Andrew was white.”

“You know what them rebels was like; anything, so long as it fucks the Establishment. They was almost like brothers.”

I parked in front of the Peter White Memorial Library. Neither of us got out. He was staring at the windshield.

“South of the Ford and east of Woodward it was like the stuff they was showing on the news from Saigon,” he said. “I mean Jeeps on the street and paratroopers in camouflage on the sidewalks and snipers up on the roofs. Everything was in ashes. Man, I was tired and high, it looked like the system had fell apart. None of the rules meant nothing. Everybody was burning, why not me?”

“That’s kind of a jump. Even drinking.”

“Not when you’re twenty-two and black and your white foreman has been watching you all week, scared shitless you’re going to freak and cut him. Man, it made me
want
to cut him. I was missing out. Anyway I had the bottle. I was in the deep slam before I remembered where I got the paint thinner; Andrew or Albert had some cans in the trunk, he said he painted houses to buy books. I don’t remember filling the bottle, but I lit the rag with a old Zippo with a bad flint and threw it. It was a pretty shot, four stories up from the foul line. Sailed nice as potato pie through a busted pane and went
cush.
Building looked just like the one my cousin died in. Oh, it was a sweet fire. I was still admiring it when they grabbed me and threw me down and screwed a rifle into the back of my neck.”

“You didn’t see the robbery or hear the shots?”

“They was shooting going on all over. That fire was all I seen or wanted to.”

“So far you’re an arsonist who pulled the kind of sentence arsonists don’t usually get and should. I’m having trouble identifying, even with your check in my pocket.”

“The neighborhood was evacuated. Maybe I’d of burned a cat, except cats never let themselves get trapped. I ain’t saying it wasn’t stupid. Didn’t you never want to burn nothing down?”

I lit a cigarette off the dash lighter and blew the smoke out the window. “I had a pretty good plan for burning down my junior high school. I didn’t like my gym teacher and the principal had it in for me. That’s as far as I got, the plan.”

“Maybe with a sore back and a bellyful of cheap wine you would of got farther.”

“Probably not. But I’ve never been black in a white world.”

“I wasn’t out to hurt nobody, black nor white. I didn’t rob no place and I didn’t shoot no guard and it wasn’t me got Davy killed.”

“Was Davy in the car?”

“Just the white dude and his dirty girlfriend. I can still smell her. I never seen Davy till they was showing pictures of his body in court. You got to realize where my head was. I didn’t know half of what was going on and I wasn’t feeling too clean on account of starting the fire and I never made the connection between Andrew or Albert and the robbery. By the time I did I had bars on my face. I wrote letters. Nobody wrote back. They had their pigeon.”

“What’s in the library?”

“Let’s go in and find out.”

The place smelled of books and oiled wood and time in a jar. Sunlight tiled the floor in gold patches and the old rosewood whimpered under DeVries’s size fifteens. At that time of day we were alone with a woman in a salmon-colored suit and a gray silk scarf seated behind the information desk. She wore her black hair short and her eyes gray. She was about thirty and looked better than the job called for. When we stopped in front of her desk she looked up from her writing — and up. The desk came to DeVries’s knees.

“It’s a woman,” he said.

“What’d you expect?” I asked. “There are more male librarians than there used to be, but you’ve still only got two possibilities.”

“I mean it’s a woman. I thought they was all married to other cons and kept behind glass.”

“May I help you?” She shifted her attention to me. It wasn’t as far to yell.

I said, “Excuse my friend. He just mustered out of the French Foreign Legion. He carried the camels when they got tired.”

“I see.” And looking at him again, she did. Living in a prison town they get so they can spot them. Something like sympathy worked under her features. It didn’t work too hard. When they smoothed over again DeVries said, “October fifteenth, 1984.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I want the Detroit
News
for October fifteenth, 1984. You got it?”

“That would be on microfilm. In there.” She pointed at a door.

I thanked her and steered the big man through it. Three of the viewers stood on a library table and the walls were lined waist-high with dated file drawers. July to December 1984 was near the floor.

“She was wearing perfume,” he said. “Did you smell it?”

“More likely cologne. Library boards haven’t bent that far.”

“What’s the difference?”

“About fifteen dollars.” I took out a box labeled
oct.
84 and we went to the table. He watched me clamp the spool of film in place and thread it through the machine. “I miss the big books.”

“Wait till you see what they’ve done to typewriters,” I said. “Say when.”

The light projected the transparencies onto the viewing screen at the bottom of the machine. I turned the crank and we watched the days blur past. It fascinated him. They hadn’t gone that quickly for him the first time.

“There! Go back.”

I reversed the crank. The page we’d just passed slid back into frame. I sharpened the focus. There were several columns on the Tigers, boiling over from the sports section in the wake of the big Series victory. I wondered how the game with Baltimore was going.

“That’s him. Albert or Andrew. I memorized the date. They didn’t let us keep clippings in the cells.”

His pointing hand obliterated most of the page. He withdrew it. The photograph had nothing to do with baseball. It showed Timothy Marianne, the former Ford Motor Company vice president in charge of engineering and design, signing a labor contract on a desk surrounded by his staff and representatives of the United Auto Workers. The caption said it was his first official act as owner-director of Marianne Motors. Since then his angular, black-browed features and thinning gray hair had become as familiar to Detroiters as the Penobscot Building.

“Timothy Marianne wasn’t in college twenty years ago,” I said. “He would have been in his mid-thirties even then.”

“Not him. The one standing on his left. You don’t forget a face like that.”

He was right. Feature writers made a lot of Marianne’s rugged good looks, but the man pictured leaning over his left shoulder in a pinstripe suit and paisley tie was someone to look at twice in a crowded elevator. His hair was black and long for an executive, combed straight back from a modest pompadour behind his ears to his collar. He had high cheekbones and light eyes and a straight nose and lips that curved like a girl’s. That fresh look would stay with him well into his thirties and already had, if he was who DeVries said he was.

I said, “It’s a place to start. I wouldn’t hope too hard. He isn’t identified. We don’t know if he belongs to Marianne or the union or if he’s still with either of them.”

“I figure we can get a line on him at his old apartment house on Twelfth. Maybe the landlord can tell us his name or where he went from there.”

“I doubt it.”

“How come?”

“The building isn’t there anymore. Neither is Twelfth Street. They bulldozed that section and renamed the whole thing years ago.”

D
EVRIES DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING
after that. I rewound the film and put it back in the box and took it into the main room, where I gave the librarian the date and page number and asked for a printout. She got up with it and went through another door, moving crisply and silently on low heels. I wondered if during the job interview they made them walk up and down and assigned points according to how much noise they didn’t make. While we were waiting I asked DeVries how he was holding up.

“I’m cool. I feel like someone changed the sheets on me is all.”

“A lot’s different. Cars and movie screens are smaller. Girls are women, when they aren’t persons. There are as many telephone companies as telephones. Movie stars are politicians, politicians are doing guest shots on TV. Cigarettes and cholesterol are out. Computers and carbohydrates are in. When a woman you don’t know approaches you in a bar it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s in business. That’s for starters. About the only thing that’s slowed down is records.”