Downriver (25 page)

“He’ll be fine,” I told Commodore Stutch. “When the story gets out he’ll be up to even
his
neck in lawyers wanting to sue the state for damages in his behalf.”

“He was better off among thieves and killers.” His tone changed. “Thank you, Walker. I’ll send Gerald to your office tomorrow with a fee for your services.”

“Have him mail it. I’m heading north tomorrow to pick up my car.”

“Would you like a brand new Stiletto? It will be a collector’s item in a few months.”

“I’d just see Mrs. Marianne lying inside every time I looked at it.”

He said good-bye and we hung up. Two weeks later Leland Stutch, aged one hundred years, three months, and twenty-seven days, died in his sleep. At that he outlived Timothy Marianne, who expired at fifty-two after ten days in a coma. The
News
ran a spread the following Sunday on the history of the automobile industry in Detroit from Stutch to Marianne. It didn’t sound like either of them and it made me wonder about all the others.

Superior looked flinty under a low overcast, the waves pointy and sharp-edged like the shattered rocks on the beach. Three ore carriers sat low and black in a line on the horizon, resembling silhouettes on a navy chart. Tiny long-legged birds stilt-walked in and out of the tide looking for whatever the lake had served up. The air had a fresh metallic chill.

I dropped the Renault where I had rented it and walked three blocks to the garage where my Chevy was supposed to be ready. It was out being test-driven. I drank unspeakable coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and read a display of fan belts until it returned. I wrote out a check for six hundred and change, put away the receipt for the insurance company, and drove from there to sheriff’s department headquarters. The inside of the car smelled like an aquarium with ammonia added.

Major R. E. Axhorn was sitting in a captain’s swivel behind a gray steel desk in an office with his name on the door. He looked big and solid in his buff-and-brown uniform with his black hair going gray, and out of place with a ballpoint pen in his hand. He recognized me right away. “See Henderson in Fraud if you got a complaint about the garage,” he said.

“No complaint. I thought you might want to know what it was you had a piece of last week.”

“That big convict with you?”

“Ex-convict. I left him in Detroit.”

He pointed the butt end of his pen at the open door. I closed it. The hinges squeaked.

“First time it’s been shut since they promoted me,” he said. “Suppose you start in with how you wound up in the lake.”

I took a seat in an upright chair with a steel frame and told the story again. I gave him what I’d given the cops and what I’d given the Commodore, and in the giving realized it was the first time I’d told it all the way through without holding anything back. He sat rocking his chair back and forth on its snivel with his hands resting on the arms, looking like a chief hearing the terms of a treaty. When I was finished I lit a Winston and drew in smoke to fill the emptiness the story left behind.

“Figure this St. Charles fellow has shot his wad, do you?” he asked.

“They all have. Him, DeVries, Orlander, Davy Jackson’s parents. Even Frances Souwaine came off tired after killing Hendriks and telling about it. It’s one reason we were able to get around her. Poison builds up only so long and then it’s got to find an outlet.”

“Trouble is it don’t leave you feeling no better afterwards.”

“The shrinks don’t think so.”

“The shrinks don’t know anything about anything. If they did they wouldn’t be committing suicide twice as often as cops. Comes a point where the poison’s the only fuel you got. Blow it off and die.”

“How are the Wakelys?”

“Lurleen dropped her kid Saturday. A boy. Looks a little like Burt and Hank both. Whoever’s sitting here sixteen years from now’s going to know him pretty good. Hank just bailed Burt out of County after Burt broke a window and two fingers in the Gitchee Goomee Saturday night. Celebrating their new cousin. Hank paid cash. I expect a B-and-E report on this desk by next weekend.”

“Seems the only difference between what you do up here and what the cops do where I come from is you don’t have to ask for names.”

“Only when the summer people are up.” He watched me, his eyes black in their dark copper setting. “You fish?”

“It’s been years.”

“We ought to go down the Seney some Sunday. They tell me the salmon downriver’s big as dolphins this year.”

“Is there ever a year they don’t say that?”

“I don’t guess there is.”

“Maybe next trip.”

“Yeah.” He rocked back and forth. “We never will, will we?”

“Never’s a long time.”

“Too bad. A man finds his soul fishing. Appreciate you coming in. Walker. You didn’t have to.”

“Sure I did.”

We shook hands and I left. I didn’t see him again. The next time I got up there, several months later on a wandering husband job that went sour in St. Ignace, a young sheriff’s lieutenant told me Bob Axhorn had left the department. I wanted to ask if he’d gone fishing. I didn’t.

Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once
The Oklahoma Punk
was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s
Motor City Blue
, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel,
Sugartown
, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is
Infernal Angels
.

Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980,
The High Rocks
was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s
The Book of Murdock
. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author.
Journey of the Dead
, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.

Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.

Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.

Estleman and his family. From left to right: older brother, Charles; mother, Louise; father, Leauvett; and Loren.

Estleman and Deborah Morgan at their wedding in Springdale, Arkansas, on June 19, 1993.

Estleman with actor Barry Corbin at the Western Heritage Awards in Oklahoma City in 1998. The author won Outstanding Western Novel for his book
Journey of the Dead
.