Downriver

by Loren D. Estleman

  “If this is some kind of sales gimmick I want the name of your employer.” There was no change in his tone. Those were the dangerous ones. Give me a yeller anytime.

  “I’m a private investigator working for Richard DeVries. Maybe you remember the name.”

  “I meet a lot of people. You’d better give me a hint. A quick one.”

  “Twenty years ago, during the riots. You’d remember him. He’s a whole lot bigger than a breadbox.”

  “Sorry, Walker. I was in England at the time of the riots, studying at Cambridge on the exchange program.”

  “He says it was Wayne State.”

  “I was at Wayne State for a year. The wrong year for the riots. I took my accounting degree from Michigan.”

  “Law, he said.”

  “Perish the thought. Your Mr. DeSoto is mistaken, Walker. Don’t bother me again.”

  I listened to the dial tone for a moment, then cradled the receiver. Rubbed my rigid neck.

  He shouldn’t have said DeSoto. Either you remember a simple name like DeVries or you plain forget it. You don’t get it wrong unless you try. Or maybe you do. There are just no rules for that sort of thing, only a grumbling in the guts, and I had that.

  I decided to let it grumble for a while and got out my pocket notebook where I’d scratched down the information DeVries had fed me about Davy Jackson’s family. If any of the slain armored car robber’s relatives were still in the area and had a telephone I’d find them in the directory. The ex-convict was right about one thing: Twenty years isn’t enough time to go from the smell of cooked cabbage in the hallway to an unlisted number. Not in that place, and not without a gun.

  Davy’s parents’ names were Cleveland J. and Emmaline Jackson. They were together the last DeVries knew, but his knowledge had been left standing in a jar for two decades. There were no entries under either name, but I made a list of Jacksons with the initial C. or E. and one C. J. and started dialing. I got two no-answers, a busy signal, a man with a Tennessee drawl as thick as Graceland who had a cousin named Davy alive and kicking down Murfreesboro way, and two offers not to be alone Saturday night. One of them was from a man named Calvin.

  I tried the busy line again. It belonged to C. J. Jackson.

  “You get ’er straightened out?”

  A man’s voice, very slow and scratchy, like a wornout tape. I said, “Get who straightened out?”

  “Ain’t you fambly service?”

  “Not today.”

  “Hell. I been all morning trying to scare up a pair of crutches for the wife. Dog-damn computer never heard of us, and we been with Welfare since ’sixty-two. Sure you ain’t fambly service?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Hell. You think we was fixing to sell them crutches and run off to Mexico.”

  “Are you Cleveland J. Jackson?”

  “Who wants him?”

  “Was Davy Jackson your son?”

  In the quiet on his end I heard the electronic laughter of a TV situation comedy rerun turned down low. “You a reporter?”

  “No.”

  “ ’Cause one called here once, said he was doing a piece on the riots. Said he wanted to talk to the relatives of all the victims that was still living in Detroit. I told him to go do it up a rope. He went ahead and wrote the story anyway. You do that I’ll kill you. I got a gun.”

  “My name’s Walker. Richard DeVries hired me to investigate the robbery.”

  “He in jail.”

  “He’s out.”

  “Dog-damn.”

  I couldn’t read him. He would have had years of practice at not being read. I said, “He says he didn’t do it. He wants me to find the ones who did.”

  “Them ’Guards seen him fire that place.”

  “He admits to that. It’s the robbery he wants me to find out about.” I waited. The droid audience on his TV was becoming hysterical. I asked him finally if I could come out and talk.

  “Our boy Davy was no good,” he said. “I done told his mother but she didn’t hear it. He dead, what I want to talk about him for?”

  “I think if you didn’t want to we wouldn’t still be talking now.”

  “I ain’t got the time. I got this crutch thing to chew over.”

  I lined up my notebook with the edges of the desk blotter. “How tall is Mrs. Jackson?”

  Heat was rising in thick greasy sheets from the pavement in front of the Jacksons’ house when I curbed the Renault between a gypsy van missing its left front fender and an Opel station wagon with Saran Wrap taped over an empty window. Mine was the only car on the street with all its equipment. As I was getting out with the aluminum crutches I’d bought at a hospital supply house on Michigan, a reedy lad of fifteen or sixteen separated himself from a gang brawling over a soccer ball in a burned-out lot on the corner and slithered over. Some of the shine went out of his eyes when I stood up and tucked the crutches under one arm.

  “Watch your car for five bucks,” he said. “They been shooting out headlights in this neighborhood.”

  I onced him over. He was almost my height but forty pounds lighter, in khaki pants and a stained nylon mesh football jersey with the hem hanging to his thighs. He was wearing the skinhead cut that had replaced the Afro while I was looking in some other direction. I turned to slam the car door and grasped his belt through the jersey and pulled him in close, shoving the padded armpieces of the crutches under his nose and bending his head back. He struggled, but his neck creaked and he stopped. There was pink fog in the whites of his eyes.

  “Give it over,” I said.

  It took a little more pressure from the crutches, but after a second he reached behind his back and came out with an air pistol with a heavy plastic stock rigged to look like an auto mag. I leaned the crutches against the car and accepted the pistol. Then I let go of his belt.

  “That cost fourteen bucks and change.”

  “You talk like you bought it.” I stuck it under my waistband, giving him a hinge at the butt of the Smith just before I refastened my coat. “If I’ve still got headlamps when I come out you get it back. Don’t bother blowing off steam anyplace else. The car’s rented.”

  He left me. Halfway back to the empty lot he unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants and bent over. I fingered the grip of the air pistol, then decided against it. I was mellowing.

  10

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD HAD been decent before the city started turning streets with bad reputations into parks and expressways, which was like cutting into a malignant but dormant mole and releasing carcinogens throughout the system. The slide would have begun with occasional B-and-E’s and ended with old people crossing the street to avoid knots of cigarette-sucking youths blocking the sidewalk. In a year or so the place would be a park or an expressway and it would be another neighborhood’s turn in the box.

  For all that, the Jacksons’ house showed efforts to slowdown the skid. The crabgrass was cut, the old boards repainted recently, and some streetwise flowers grew in boxes under the windows looking like tough kids in bright knit caps. Somebody had painted the house number on the curb, but somebody else had sprayed it over with a word that belonged there. I followed a row of sunken flagstones to the stoop and rapped on the screen door.

  I could make out some furniture inside, but the room wasn’t lighted and the double-ply screen was set a little off, obscuring details. I didn’t figure that was an accident. Floorboards shifted and then a short thick black man came to the screen holding something that looked like a gun.

  “Mr. Jackson? I’m Amos Walker, the man who called.” I opened my ID folder and flattened it out against the screen.

  He reached up and flipped an invisible hook out of an unseen eye. “Come ahead in.”

  I opened the door against the pull of an ailing spring and caught it behind me before it slammed. He had stepped back to give me room. He had on a white shirt with an open collar stuffed into colorless slacks and his feet were shod in imitation moccasins with simulated leather stitchi
ng. The thing that had looked like a gun was a bar of tarnished lead like they used in Linotype machines, about ten inches long. He saw me looking at it and balanced it on his palm.

  “I was a dog-damn good printer before they offsetted me clean out of the business. I got enough of this in the attic to sink the Boblo boat.”

  “Where’s the gun?”

  “Hell, the wife won’t have one in the house since Davy. Them the ones?”

  I held out the crutches. He stuck the lead bar in his hip pocket and took them, fitting them under his own arms. He had a wide mouth and deep creases in his forehead and eyes like shotgun pellets lodged in cracks. And gray hair and a thick neck. So had a lot of older black men, including the one who had helped drive DeVries and me into the lake, if Hank Wakely told the truth.

  “A mite tall for Emmaline,” said the old man, testing his weight on the aluminum. “She knee-high to a pig knuckle.”

  “They’re adjustable. Just loosen the screws there and there and slide up the bottoms.”

  He leaned the crutches in a corner. “Take a load off, son. Can I get you something cold? They’s all kinds of pop and juice in the icebox. No beer, though. The wife don’t hold with spirits. Won’t have them in the house.”

  We were in a living room paneled in woodgrain vinyl with a nylon rug and three chairs and a sofa covered in knobby synthetic. Nothing expensive, but nothing old and worn out either, and all of it very clean. The one quality item was an antique sideboard older than the house, with family pictures on it in brass and silver frames. Several of them featured a more slender, much younger version of Cleveland J. Jackson, wearing a style of clothing not yet designed when he was a youth. The wide mouth was built for smiling. “Davy?” I asked.

  “That boy liked having his pitcher took. I did too, his age. You know you got old when you start walking away from cameras. How about that cold one?”

  “Thanks, I’m fine. How does Mrs. Jackson stand on tobacco?”

  “Won’t have it in the house. But she upstairs snoozing.” He picked up a candy dish from the end table between the chairs, tipped the peppermints out into another dish containing caramels in plastic wrappers, and set the empty dish down next to my elbow. I lit up and placed the match in the dish. It was close in the room and most of the peppermints were fused together in a bright lump. I asked if Mrs. Jackson had had an accident.

  “Slipped in some water at the post office last February and busted her hip.” He took a seat in the chair nearest mine, grunted, took the lead bar out of his hip pocket, and laid it on the table. “She gets around with a walker but I don’t want her getting used to it. You gots to keep moving, son. That’s the secret.”

  “Any lawyers knock on your door?”

  “Like woodpeckers in heat. I should sue the government, let my dead sister’s junkie kid Delmer collect when we’re in the ground? Anyway, the wife don’t like to cause no fuss. You say Richie’s out?”

  “They sprang him day before yesterday.”

  “What’s it been, ten-twelve years?”

  “Twenty. They paroled him.”

  “Dog-damn. Don’t seem twenty. Bet it does to him, though. How’s he look?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Sure. Him and Davy was some tight. I always thought that boy was headed for a fall, though. He was just too angry. You don’t know what it was like to be black and angry in ’sixty-seven. They was restaurants around here wouldn’t serve us. Someone busted in your house with a gun, you called the cops, they might come out before the end of the shift if it wasn’t too far and their feet didn’t hurt. White folks half your age calling you boy, and them was the friendly ones. It was like that if you lived invisible and didn’t talk back. Otherwise they come down on you like a bucket of shit. Davy he went bad, I knew he’d get hisself chewed up; when they called and said he was dead it was like he been that way a long time. But I was scared for Richie. He had a chance to pull hisself out. I see him slapping that ball all over the community court and bringing that hoop down like he mad at it and I think, slow down, Richie. It was like watching your own boy run out into traffic.”

  “You think he was in on the robbery?”

  “Not for the money. Well, some. You see neighbors never even jaywalked all their lives throwing bricks and grabbing anything they can throw their arms around you get to thinking whatever you take ain’t half what’s owed. It wasn’t the money, though. It was the taking.”

  “His story is he never even knew the robbery was going down. He started the fire just to start the fire. He thinks he was set up.”

  “Not by Davy.”

  “Not by Davy. Have you ever seen this man?” I showed him the printout photograph, pointing at Alfred Hendriks.

  “I seen him somewheres. On TV, I think.”

  “Anywhere else? Twenty years ago, maybe, and much younger?”

  “Son, my mother died fifteen years ago. I don’t hardly remember what she looked like.”

  “Just a stab.” I put away the printout. “Where were you Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Jackson?”

  “Over at the A ’n’ P. I do the shopping Wednesdays.”

  “Anyone see you?”

  “What happened Wednesday?” he asked.

  “Someone tried to stop DeVries on the road outside Marquette. I was there. So was someone else, and the description he gave of the man behind it could fit you.”

  “Be a tough fit. I never been that far north. I ain’t drove a car in eight years. You see anything in my driveway besides what the neighbor’s dog left there?”

  “It wasn’t much of a description. It just occurred to me someone might blame DeVries for your son’s death.”

  “I do.”

  This was a new voice. I looked at the top of the uncarpeted staircase by the front door, where an old black woman in a floor-length yellow nightgown trimmed with lace stood supporting herself on the railing. Her hair was white and sleep-tangled and her face had the startled look that faces sometimes take on when their owners can’t get over the fact that they’ve become old. She was trembling fit to shake the whole second story.

  “Woman, what you doing up without your walker?” Jackson braced his hands on the arms of his chair.

  “Richie killed our Davy,” she said.

  I put out my cigarette in the candy dish. I felt as if I’d been caught smoking behind the barn.

  “I can understand your thinking he’s responsible, Mrs. Jackson.”

  “Responsible? He killed him. Killed him.”

  Jackson made a little noise that took my attention off his wife. His eyes were shut tight, making a cracked mud sculpture of his face. Only his knuckles turning yellow on the chair arms showed life.

  “Tell him, Cleveland.”

  He opened his eyes slowly. I swore I could hear the lids grating like old shutters. Then he breathed, and it really was like watching a statue become animated, the dead cells blinking on like tiny lights. “It wasn’t nothing.” He rubbed his palms up and down the arms of the chair. “Something that big lieutenant said.”

  “What lieutenant?” I asked.

  “The one that come to talk to us after Davy got killed. What was his name, Emmaline?”

  “Orlander. Lieutenant Floyd Orlander.” It sounded like a catechism.

  “Orlander, that was it. He said the cops didn’t shoot Davy and neither did the ’Guards. The bullet they took out of him at the autopsy didn’t belong to any of their guns. Orlander thought one of the other robbers shot him.”

  “DeVries.”

  “Maybe. The stickup was like right around the corner and them ’Guards didn’t have their eyes on Richie the whole time, what with their attention being split between them. Davy was backshot behind the building running away.”

  “Why kill one of your own partners?”

  “He wanted it all,” said Mrs. Jackson. “Greed, that’s one of the sins.”

  “Nobody ever said it was him done it, woman. He didn’t have no gun when they picked him up.
”

  “He threw it in the fire.”

  “Somebody else got the money,” I said. “He never left the arson scene.”

  Jackson said, “Orlander thought Richie and the others worked it out before the robbery. Davy was kind of loud, especially when he drank. They shut him up and sweetened their own pile to boot. Only Richie got grabbed before he could take his split.”

  “Sounds like Orlander had it in for him.”

  “Them sportswriters was starting to notice Richie. Some white folks just can’t stand watching a brother pick hisself up. I can’t say if Orlander was like that. His partner was. He had this rat-face sergeant who would of looked right fine decked out in a sheet and dunce cap. I don’t remember his name. Emmaline?”

  She shook her head. Her face was shining. The strain of holding herself up was getting to her.

  “Mean man,” Jackson said. “Wouldn’t sit down in my house. Like he was afraid he get something on his pants. It was like I never left Mississippi.”

  “I read up on the case. I never saw anything about Davy being shot by one of his own.”

  “Hot time. Maybe they didn’t want to stir nothing up.”

  “Makes sense. They’d never have made a case like that stick anyway, without the weapon.” I rose. “ Thanks, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson. You didn’t have anything to do with what happened up north. I had to ask.”

  “I would of if I could,” she said. “I’m just sorry they didn’t kill him.”

  “Woman, you don’t mean that. Killing’s a bigger sin than greed.”

  “I’d burn in hell happy.”

  He pushed himself out of his chair, caught his balance, and went up to help her back to bed, using the railing all the way. I waited. I wanted to ask if “redstick ranger” meant anything to him. It took me five minutes to realize he wasn’t coming back down. Outside, the fresh air washed over me like a spray of clean water.

  11

  I HADN’T EATEN since Grayling. I ordered off the dinner menu in a seafood place on Grand, made easy work of a bass served in horseradish, and mounted a partially successful expedition for clams in the chowder. Thus sustained I penetrated enemy territory, the granite columns at 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters.