Downriver

by Loren D. Estleman

  We stopped to eat at a Wendy’s in Grayling, a fishing and deer-hunting town gone to K-Marts and Ben Franklin stores and chain restaurants, and finished the trip in a four-hour straight shot into Detroit. Our way took us through farm country, flat and green as a crap table, past Amish barns with Quakerly faces painted twenty feet wide on the ends, and past the new Zilwaukee Bridge, still unfinished after five years, rising like Roman ruins out of the low Thumb area, cracked and leaning with a monster crane marooned on top. Detroit had made haste in the middle of the scandal to hire the same engineer for its downtown People Mover project, still unfinished after three years. DeVries liked the farms best.

  “I wasn’t looking at them much coming up in the bus,” he said. “I was busy hoping somebody’d broadside us and I’d be out a window.”

  “Hard to believe all this will fall apart if a couple of plants close in Detroit.”

  “That what they say there? Shit.”

  “It’s worth a few million from the governor to say it.”

  “They put me away for stealing a lousy two hundred thousand.”

  “What was an armored car doing there in the middle of a riot anyway?” I asked.

  “Every storeowner in the neighborhood was cleaning out their till. If you tried to do it yourself the National Guard shot you for looting. It was the modern American Revolution, man. Smash and grab and if you got shot you died for the cause and a color TV set.”

  “The thing had to have been planned. They had to have known the car would be there at that time.”

  “What my lawyer said in court. It didn’t do no good.”

  “Who arrested you?”

  “ ’Guards held me down for a big white dude in plainclothes. I don’t remember his name. Cops them days was all big and white.”

  “They’re still big.” Dusk was folding down south of the last Flint exit. I turned on the headlamps. The car slowed down. “It’s a place to start. Closed cases have a special appeal for me. Nobody’s waiting to part my hair with a nightstick.”

  “Why you want to go scratching around in that? I’m comin’ home, I done my time. All I want’s what’s mine.”

  “Prison’s worse than I thought,” I said. “Piping pop rock into your cell can’t be constitutional.”

  “Just find out who’s got the money. I’ll do what comes next.”

  “We’ll discuss what comes next. Right now I’m most interested in finding out who wants to stop you before what comes first.”

  “The cops, maybe. Maybe they think I got the money stashed and I’ll take them to it.”

  “In that case they’d have just followed you and tried not to look like cops following an economy-size ex-convict. Stealing a car and laying a trap isn’t procedure. Besides, the insurance company would have paid that off long ago, and hiked its rates to cover the loss. It’s like the money never existed.”

  “Makes it all the more mine.”

  We drove the last forty-five minutes in silence. I tried the radio and got the same static I’d gotten north of the straits. At that time I’d blamed it on the microwave telephone towers they use up there, but it was just the French getting back at us for New Orleans. We swept under a riot of layered overpasses into Detroit, lit by forty-foot lamps on both sides of the expressway to discourage motorized rapists. It was a warm night that far south and music drifted out of a dozen rolled-down windows. I asked DeVries if he had a place to stay.

  “Deputy warden gave me a voucher for a dump called the Alamo on East Jefferson.” He patted his shirt pockets, then remembered he was wearing different clothes. “If it didn’t get soaked to pieces.”

  “It’s a dump all right. I’ve got a couch at my place.”

  “Ain’t you afraid I’ll cut your throat for the silverware?”

  “You haven’t seen the silverware.”

  “I got used to my own company a long time ago. Thanks just the same.”

  The Alamo made a good case for being forgotten. The name was etched in sputtering orange neon across a plate-glass window with the shade pulled halfway down like a junkie’s eyelid and the front door, a thick paneled oak job that had been refinished under Truman, stuck in its casing and required a shoulder to open. Inside, a green brass lamp with a crooked paper shade oozed light onto a waist-high counter with a floor register in front of it to catch coins. It was someone’s job to empty it out once a month and pay the electric bill. On the wall behind the counter, next to a life-size acrylic painting on black velvet of John Wayne dressed as Davy-Crockett, a sign was tacked reading:

  THE ALAMO HOTEL

  (Permanents and Transients)

  No Pet’s

  No Children

  No Visitor’s in Rooms

  No TV or Radio after 10:00 P.M.

  Enjoy Your Stay

  A squashed fly dotted the i in “Children.”

  We were sharing the lobby with a square of trod rug and a wicker chair on a pedestal fashioned after an elephant’s foot. DeVries slapped the bell on the counter. It went click. After a minute, John Wayne swung away from us and a cadaver in a shawl collar and brown wing tips came in through a door squirreled behind the painting. He was a tall item of forty or sixty, but nowhere near as tall as DeVries, with black hair pasted down on a narrow skull and fuzzy white sidewalls and white stubble on his chin. When he stopped at the counter with the light coming up at him through the opening in the top of the lampshade he looked just like Vincent Price.

  DeVries got out the wrinkled voucher he had separated from the clothes in his overnight bag and smoothed it out on the counter. “ They told me this is good for a week,” he said.

  Vincent Price didn’t look down at it. “Ten bucks.”

  “They said the room’s paid for. State takes care of it.”

  “The ten bucks is for you. Leave the paper.”

  The big man ran a hand over his beard.

  “Welfare scam,” I said. “He rents the room to somebody else for the regular rate, then turns the voucher in to the state and gets paid a second time. It happens a lot during the winter when Lansing remembers the tramps and bag ladies on the street.”

  “I don’t want ten bucks. I want a room.”

  Vincent Price hit the bell, and this time it rang. John Wayne got out of the way of a young, very fat black man in king-size green slacks and a paint-stained gray sweatshirt gnawed off above the elbows, who came in from the back and walked around the end of the counter to stand next to DeVries. He was carrying a Louisville Slugger.

  The counterman said, “Take the ten or don’t, but leave the paper.”

  DeVries took the baseball bat away and broke it over his knee. He tossed the pieces onto the counter. The big end rolled off and landed on the floor with a clank.

  “Registration card.” I waggled my fingers at Vincent Price, who took his jaw off the counter and slid one over. I selected a pen from a coffee cup full of them to hand to DeVries.

  The fat man sent his right hook by Western Union. It started two inches above the rug and picked up speed as it rose, his body pivoting behind it with more grace than you’d have thought him capable of if you’d never seen a bouncer in action. DeVries watched it coming, then slapped it aside and stepped in and picked him up in both arms. He started squeezing.

  Vincent Price reached under the counter. I pointed the Smith & Wesson at him. He relaxed and laid both hands on top, empty. I switched grips on the gun and clicked the pen. “E-I?” I asked.

  “I-E. Big D and V.” The big man’s voice was strained. Not much, but a little. He was out of shape.

  By the time I had the card filled out the fat man had lost consciousness, a large yarn doll dangling in the ex-convict’s embrace. I said, “You better let him go now. He doesn’t look black anymore.”

  He spread his arms and the bouncer slid out of them. The counterman looked down at him disgustedly. “You killed him.”

  Just then the man on the floor took a deep breath and started coughing like a cat. I said, “Nothing w
rong with him that can’t be cured with ten or twenty yards of tape and no pole-vaulting for a month. Key.”

  He slapped down a brass one with a green plastic tag. “Eighteen. Upstairs, end of the hall.”

  DeVries picked it up. “You want to meet here tomorrow, or your office?”

  “I had a partner once. It didn’t take.” I put the gun behind my hip. “You hired me, remember?”

  “Who’s going to look after the shotguns and baseball bats?”

  “I got this old without help.”

  He rubbed his beard. I was coming to know the gesture. I said, “The parole board says you can’t get into trouble. It doesn’t say you can’t pay someone to get into it for you. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Okay,” he said after a silence. “Don’t make me come looking for news. I stink at waiting. Marquette taught me that much.”

  I went out after shaking his hand. He was getting better at it. The bundle on the floor made a lowing noise.

  8

  SOMEBODY HAD MADE a stab at breaking into my place while I was gone. During my routine inspection walk around the outside of the house I saw the gouges under the bedroom window where whoever it was had tried to force it with a pinch bar, but the paint was unbroken around the frame, so he must have given up. Maybe a blue-and-white had cruised down the street or — less likely — a neighbor had spotted him and sung out. It sure wasn’t due to any burglarproofing on my part. The decision to live without bars on my windows was a hard one, right up there with electing not to change my sex. Not that there was anything inside worth taking except a cheap stereo, a geriatric TV, two suits, and a shower. The Persian rugs were all out being deloused.

  I washed off the Upper Peninsula in the shower, put on a robe, and called my service for messages. A junior partner at a legal firm I sometimes collect affidavits for had called asking me to get back to him, then called again later to cancel the request. A man had tried to reach me saying he was a vampire and wanted someone to act as go-between with the police before he handed himself over; I should return his call anytime after sundown. Two people had called asking for me and then hung up without leaving their names. That would be the last I’d hear from them. It was a comfort to know I had a service and hadn’t missed any of this.

  I’d made a purchase at an all-night liquor store where an alert salesclerk operated the cash register one-handed, keeping the other out of sight under the drawer. I pulled the bottle out of the bag and corrupted the innocence of a clean glass in the kitchen, wound the Seth Thomas in the living room, put on something hoarse and smoky by Anita O’Day, and sat down in front of the speakers to wait for the mellow. Some men need a drink to wind down after a lively couple of days. I get along just fine on music and a drink.

  Two issues of the News had been waiting for me on the doorstep. I’d forgotten to suspend delivery, which was why my would-be burglar had thought the place worth a try. That day’s, Thursday’s, had a front-page piece on Marianne Motors, which was seldom absent from the headlines now that production had begun on the Stiletto, a gunmetal sportabout designed for middle-aging men and women for whom the Corvette was too much car. An insert in the photograph that ran with the article showed the vehicle parked in the middle of a barren proving ground with gull wings raised, looking like a fiberglass bird of prey. The main picture featured a grinning Timothy Marianne accepting a check from a heavy dark-suited bald man who looked like he’d rather be anyplace else. The caption identified him as Hector Stutch, president and chairman of the board of Stutch Petrochemicals and one of the grandsons of Leland Stutch, who in 1901 had mounted an internal combustion engine on a carriage body in his father’s barn and thirty years later sold the Stutch Motor Corporation to General Motors for eighty-five million Depression dollars. The Commodore, as old Leland had been known since retooling to produce minesweepers for the navy during the First World War, was reported in good health and semiretirement as Hector’s consultant in the family mansion in Grosse Pointe, having observed his one hundredth birthday in February of that year. The photograph had been taken to commemorate Stutch Petrochemicals’ investment of seven hundred and fifty million dollars in Marianne Motors.

  The check was a dummy. Barons the likes of Stutch and Marianne didn’t get ink on their hands or stand in line at the bank. Someone who made twenty thousand a year tapped some keys and a number followed by a flock of zeroes flew through the ether from one corporate account into another. But that didn’t make as good a picture.

  The story that accompanied it was more of the same. With his customary flamboyance Marianne had acquired a bankrupt tractor plant downriver, razed most of it, put up a new building, and installed state-of-the-art equipment at a cost far exceeding what would have been needed to start from scratch. This had drawn plenty of criticism from the rest of the industry, but the local economy had benefited from the increased demand for labor and the energetic new magnate was a popular speaker on the chicken-and-peas circuit. He had used his considerable personal charm to wangle large investments at home and abroad, although none was as big as Stutch’s. The reclusive Commodore was an unknown factor because of his age, but his grandsons were careful businessmen and speculation ran high that the financial vote of confidence would loosen a great many purse strings on Wall Street. In workingmen’s bars throughout Detroit and its suburbs the patrons were singing “All day, all night, Marianne,” referring to production at the Stiletto plant.

  The media had fallen in love with him, the way they will with good-looking men who speak well and spend a lot of money and glitter when they walk. He had been consulted on everything from presidential candidacy to his favorite Christmas carol and always offered up something quotable that would offend nobody the public didn’t want offended. Those editorialists and market analysts who counseled caution were trampled under the same stampede that had swept several local mediocre boxers and clownish ballplayers toward their inevitable Waterloos. It played hell with your faith in the basic wisdom of mankind.

  I turned to the box scores to see where the Tigers stood, then read the funnies and my horoscope. I was warned to approach new ventures warily. I bought myself a wary second drink and warily flipped the record on the turntable. When that side was finished I tried some wary TV. It was getting thin by that time.

  I caught the last twenty minutes of a colorized version of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo — Spencer Tracy had blue eyes and a complexion like Deanna Durbin’s —and then the newsbreak came on just before sign-off. Someone had blown up a restaurant in Beirut and so far three groups had claimed credit for the explosion. The President had caught a fish while on vacation. Local news was dominated by the press conference following the announcement of the Stutch deal with Marianne Motors. Wonder Boy himself broke the news, fielded a few hyper questions from the reporters, then turned the floor over to Alfred Hendriks, his new general manager, and strode out of the room, stopping at the door to look back and wave before passing through it. He had no bodyguards that I could spot. Which might mean that he had some very good bodyguards. In any case I wasn’t paying too much attention to Marianne.

  The reason for that was Alfred Hendriks. The slim handsome dark man who had taken his employer’s place at the podium had aged slightly, but he was the same man who had been photographed with the automaker at the time the contract was signed with the UAW; the same man, according to Richard DeVries, who had handed DeVries a Molotov cocktail to cover for an armored car robbery during the worst race riots in the city’s history.

  9

  I GOT UP the next morning with a stiff neck, some kind of delayed reaction to the dip in Lake Superior. I waggled it, bombarded it under the shower head, took a couple of aspirins, and rubbed in some cream from a tube that smelled like Stillman’s Gym. After a cup of coffee and a radio weather report calling for unseasonably high temperatures I put on the blue summerweight and knotted a red silk tie that looked cool and nonabrasive to my freshly shaved throat. By then my neck had frozen up tighter than a fence
post. Backing the Renault out of the garage was one for Torquemada.

  My office mail was fanned out under the slot in the door with A. WALKER INVESTIGATIONS lettered on the glass. I read the envelopes on my way through the waiting room and dumped them into the wastebasket in the private office. I used the duster on the desk and telephone, called my service to tell them I was in the traces, then looked up a number in the metropolitan directory, and used the telephone again.

  “Marianne Motors, executive offices.” One of those quality-controlled female voices.

  “Alfred Hendriks, please.”

  “One moment.”

  I listened to eight bars of the Marianne Motors advertising jingle.

  “Mr. Hendriks’ office.” This one had been inspected even more closely.

  “May I speak to Mr. Hendriks?”

  “Who is calling?”

  “Amos Walker.”

  “Hold, please.”

  Second chorus.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Hendriks is in a meeting. May I take a message?”

  I said no and told her good-bye. I lit a cigarette and smoked half of it. Then I ran the gauntlet again. I knew the jingle by heart now.

  “Mr. Hendriks’ office.”

  I deepened my voice a notch. “This is Adolf Wentz, vice president in Investments at Stutch Petrochemicals. We’ve run into a hitch and I need to discuss it with Mr. Hendriks.”

  “One moment, Mr. Wentz.”

  The jingle was cut off in mid-lyric. “What sort of hitch?”

  This was a man’s voice, smoothly blended, but not smoothly enough to overcome the wheatfields in it; a toned-down Henry Fonda. “Mr. Hendriks?”

  “What sort of hitch, Mr. Wentz?”

  “Sort of none,” I said. “Adolf Wentz was my algebra teacher in high school. Those German names cut through a lot. My name’s Walker. I own a pocket comb with STUTCH PETROCHEMICALS stamped on it, but that’s my only connection with the firm.”