Downriver

by Loren D. Estleman

  He looked at her, then at me. I folded a tomato slice with my fork. I’ve never found a delicate way to get one into my mouth short of cutting.

  “I’d have to have something in writing,” he said. “An agreement not to go public.”

  “Nonsense, Tim. What would you do with it if he reneged, take it to court? Think of it as a nuisance settlement and enter it under public relations.”

  After a moment he put his palms on the table. “I’ll get my checkbook.”

  “While you’re at it,” I said, “make one out to Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland J. Jackson for a million.”

  “Who the hell are they?”

  “The parents of the young man who was killed. If twenty lost years are worth two hundred grand I figure a son’s life runs to a million at least.”

  “You said DeVries would be satisfied.”

  “We’re not talking about satisfying DeVries now. We’re talking about satisfying me.”

  He stood. “I was going to apologize for threatening you yesterday. The thing took me by surprise and I was worried about a company I spent eight years developing and my entire life dreaming about. I’m not feeling sorry now. In fact—”

  The cook came out empty-handed. “Telephone, mister.”

  “Who is it?” he snapped.

  “Onderson, he say. He say he waiting, where you?”

  “Anderson. Damn it, I forgot. I promised to conduct him personally through the downriver plant.”

  “Have somebody else do it,” said his wife.

  “I can’t. I promised. He’s the biggest dealer in the Southwest.” He looked at me. “We’re not through.”

  “Go play tour guide. I’ll talk to Mr. Walker.”

  He hovered. She said, “Twenty percent of Marianne stock is in my name. I’m not going to sell out the company.”

  “No deals without my approval.”

  “You’re the chairman. Run along now, shoo.”

  He went out, trailing the cook. A minute later we heard the Stiletto’s exhaust booming down the driveway. His wife smiled at me. “My rival’s a sports car,” she said.

  “He’s an idiot.”

  “Those things he said — he isn’t that way, really. He’s a gentle man with dreams.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like him.”

  She leaned her chin on her hand. She looked almost Oriental except for the hair. “I’m thirstier than I am hungry, how about you?”

  “I’m caught up on my fruit and roughage quota this week,” I said.

  She summoned the cook. “Elda, we won’t be dining after all. Take the afternoon off.”

  “Roast is almost ready.” She wiped muscular hands on her apron.

  “I’ll put it in the refrigerator. Mr. Marianne and I will have it for dinner.”

  When she’d gone, banging the front door behind her, we went into the living room. Mrs. Marianne walked a little in front. She had a trim waist and slim hips, slightly rounded. Trailing behind I smelled a spring night.

  “What should I pour?” She mounted a platform behind the bar.

  “Anything over ice is okay.”

  She got the ice out of a pygmy refrigerator, filled two barrel glasses, squirted soda in one, and poured from a Stolichnaya bottle. I was sitting in an ivory-upholstered rocker when she brought the drinks over. “The sofa’s more comfortable.”

  It looked it, six feet of white crushed leather with yellow claw feet. I switched seats and accepted the glass that didn’t contain soda. She curled up on the cushion next to mine, slipping off her shoes and tucking her feet under her. This close I could see fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. They looked better than the amount of make-up it would have taken to cover them completely.

  “Were you a police officer?” The last r almost wasn’t there. We were pretty far down the Mississippi now.

  “I took the oath.”

  “And?”

  “It didn’t take me.” The imported vodka had a bite. It wasn’t a polite Saturday afternoon drink by any standards.

  “You said you were married once.”

  “Not enough.”

  “Tim changed my stand on marriage. My sister had a bad common-law relationship. She died in an accident soon after it ended. I always thought she planned it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She was an early casualty of the sexual revolution. You remember how it was.”

  “I was majoring in sociology. I missed Woodstock.”

  “You don’t look like you’ve missed much since.” She was pretty close now. The Scotch I’d had that morning and the vodka I was having and her dewy perfume were lifting me out of myself. I was treading fog.

  “Do you really own a fifth of Marianne Motors?” I asked.

  “Tax precaution. Tim has my proxy.” She was studying my face. “Did you break your nose once?”

  “Twice. It helps hold up my dark glasses.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t have it fixed. It saves you from being pretty. I had my fill of pretty men in the modeling business.”

  “I bet you did.”

  “I wasn’t born the day I met Tim.”

  “You said.”

  She watched me over the rim of her glass. “Do more women hire you than men, or is it the other way around?”

  “Women had the edge when I started. Now it averages out about equal. Wives and mothers ducking out on their families to get themselves fulfilled. The husbands come in.”

  “The women — the ones who hire you and the ones you find — I imagine they’re desperate. A Casanova could make out like a rabbit in your profession.”

  I drank. “I should warn you I don’t seduce so well on melon balls and lettuce.”

  “I bet you do.”

  She climbed into my lap, all hungry lips and busy hands and her thigh pressing my groin. I fought, not hard enough to spill my drink. Her lips tasted of strawberry gloss and Stolichnaya.

  When we came apart she said, “Do you have something to ask me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ask.”

  “Where did you and Alfred Hendriks go last night?”

  She stiffened and drew back. Rattled the ice in her glass.

  “Well. Aren’t we the good little detective.”

  “The good randy little detective. I believe in telling someone when she’s done a good job. But I work Saturdays. Does your husband know?”

  “Why, are you thinking of telling him?”

  “So I’m right. You and Hendriks are fooling around.”

  She laughed. It was a tinkly kind of laugh, straight off the levee. “I bet that works most of the time. But not in this case, because we aren’t. I’m faithful to Tim.”

  “You felt faithful.”

  “What I did here was for him. You’re an attractive man, so is Al. I already said that doesn’t affect me. Even if I didn’t love Tim, if I were some kind of leech, do you think I’d jeopardize a goldmine to play nice with the help?”

  “I don’t know what you’d do, Mrs. Marianne. I just met you. So far I’ve been fed and liquored and almost ravished by the mistress of the plantation. Laying out the one million two would be a lot less trouble. I’d like to know what makes me worth it.”

  “Go ahead, tell my husband. He’ll laugh in your face, just before he has you hauled before a judge.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. One automobile ride isn’t grounds for anything, and by now you’ve already started on your story. Besides, I don’t work that way. All I did was ask where you two went. You gave me the rest.”

  She swung a bare foot back and forth off the edge of the sofa. “If you’re waiting for me to walk you to the door, forget it.”

  “I’ll find it. I’m a detective.” I set my glass on the carpet and got up. “Thanks for lunch. I’ll recommend this place to all my overweight friends.”

  “You don’t have any friends. Only clients.”

  “And not enough of them. It’s none of my business now, but I think your roast is b
urning.”

  She didn’t move. “What will DeVries say when you tell him you turned down two hundred thousand dollars?”

  “He might fire me. I’ve been fired before. If I gave you a list of some of the people who have canned me you’d be impressed. We don’t always agree on what they hired me to do.”

  “You keep saying you’re a detective. What are you really?”

  “Protoplasm in an eighty-nine-dollar suit, plus tax. But it’s my suit. Enjoy your weekend, Mrs. Marianne.”

  Driving away from there I could still smell her perfume. I opened the windows and smoked a cigarette to flush out my sinuses. I had sweated a little in spite of the air conditioning in the house, and by the time I parked in the lot near my building I had a chill. The heat in the stairwell warmed me.

  There was no good reason to be there except the homing instinct. I’d reached another dead end and had nothing to do upstairs but check for customers. As it happened I had one waiting.

  21

  IT WAS A BLUE single-breasted today, with a matching cap and visor planted on the back of his head as if to halt the retreat of the curly hair. If I knew my chauffeur’s etiquette, it meant he was driving blue today instead of the gray Cadillac. When I entered the waiting room he rose lazily from the upholstered bench, grinning in his beard.

  “You’re more important than I had figured,” he said. “The old man almost never works this time of day.” He handed me a gray cardboard folder sealed with shiny black tape.

  “Do I tip you or what?”

  “You could if you want your arm broken. I left all that when I went to work for the Commodore. You get any sleep? You look awful.”

  “It’s my love life.”

  “Man, I hope she’s worth it.” He pulled the cap forward. “Anything back?”

  “Tell him thanks and I’ll be in touch.”

  When he’d gone I picked up my mail, unlocked the inner office, and put the mail on the desk without looking at it. I slit the tape with a letter opener I never used and spread out the folder’s contents. Personnel at Wayne State and the University of Michigan had worked fast to get student transcripts printed out and hand-delivered to the mansion in Crosse Pointe, and Cambridge had worked just as fast to cable information across the Atlantic to a terminal at Stutch Petrochemicals. There would be scholarships involved, maybe a college or two. Here and there someone had penned clarifying comments in the margins in a faint but steady hand that had to be the Commodore’s. It had all been supervised by someone who either didn’t know or refused to acknowledge that in the computer age nothing has to go anywhere without collecting dust and disinterest on several desks in between.

  After twenty minutes I swiveled away and looked out the window at the roof of the tax office next door, where a half-naked workman burned brown to the waist was spreading tar. What I’d found out looked the same when I was watching him as when I was reading it in print and the old man’s spidery script.

  A scholarship had come through for Alfred Hendriks, a freshman studying at Wayne State, to enroll in the Cambridge School of Economics beginning in April 1967. He didn’t register for classes until that fall, pleading delay due to a death in the family. Mail and messages until then were to be forwarded to an apartment address on Detroit’s Twelfth Street in care of a Frances Souwaine. She would be a skinny blonde hippie-type, although there was no mention of that in the folder. Whether she was or not, it put Hendriks where Richard DeVries said he was at the time of the riots in July.

  The other item of interest, included only because the Commodore was thorough and got everything, was a copy of an application for a student loan from the University of Michigan, where Hendriks had taken his accounting degree in 1970. Under PAST EMPLOYMENT Hendriks had listed several positions, including a part-time bookkeeping job at a quick-print shop on Brady.

  It wasn’t court evidence. All it meant was that Hendriks had planned and conducted the robbery for which DeVries had gone to prison. He had finessed DeVries into bombing a building as cover and had shot Davy Jackson, his own accomplice, in the act of fleeing the scene. But not where the statue of the lady with the blindfold was concerned. She had to have it in her lap.

  I slid all the papers back inside the folder, resealed it with the tape, and locked it in the safe with my shirts and underwear. Then I closed the office and fired up the rented Renault and took off for the National Bank Building, where according to Marianne, Hendriks was working overtime on a Saturday. On the way I unholstered the Smith & Wesson and checked the cylinder. The chambered cartridges glinted golden in the sun. Maybe he’d confess and I’d arrest him, just like on TV.

  The lobby was nearly deserted, as was the street out front. Lake St. Clair would be jammed with tanning bodies and bright sails. Hendriks and I seemed to be the only ones on company time that afternoon. I punched the button for the express elevator and waited. None of the others stopped at the Marianne offices. I tried twice more. It was out of order. I took the local to the next closest floor and climbed the stairs the rest of the way. Stairwells reveal the true nature of a building. This one was as bleak as a banker’s compassion.

  The fire door let me into an anonymous hallway lined with locked doors without identifying signs. Light from a window at the end streamed unbroken down a square tunnel smelling of Mop ’n’ Glo, silent but for an echoing noise somewhere on that floor. At first I thought it was a truck on the expressway. More trundle than rumble, it sounded like a bored child rolling a supermarket cart back and forth, over and over across an uneven floor. I stood listening to it for several seconds before I could tell which direction it was coming from. Then I turned and started that way along the corridor, following my own gray shadow.

  No one appeared for the hall’s entire length. My footsteps clapped back on themselves from the walls. They were the only footsteps on that floor.

  A door stood ajar a third of the way down. I pushed it open farther and looked at a computer terminal on a steel desk with a swivel chair turned at a right angle. The screen was blank but for the word HOLD Hashing on and off in emerald green in its center. A manual the size of a monk’s Bible lay closed on top of the terminal. I withdrew my head. The noise, louder now, seemed to have taken on a distinct rhythm, like a conga line. For no reason that I could put words to I reached back and closed my hand around the butt of the revolver in its holster.

  The hall cornered around at the end, where I started down another just as long, the gun out now. The noise was louder yet. At midpoint another short passage divided the inner wall to my right. This was the reception area, where DeVries had trashed two guards yesterday. The noise was there. An arm was there too, on the floor and sticking out from the wall in a dark coatsleeve.

  I kept to that wall as I approached it. A head of dark hair sprinkled with gray lay on the arm. Both protruded from inside the express elevator car, where the doors kept trying to close, encountered the arm, and shunted back open to try again. The trundling was hypnotic.

  I put the gun in both hands, stepped away from the wall, and executed a policeman’s turn, covering the interior of the car. It was full of dead man and air conditioning. The walls were paneled in smoked glass, starred in three places at the rear where something the size of my finger had struck it. The carpet was stained dark. Part of the stain overlapped into the hallway. The edge smeared when I touched it with a toe.

  I didn’t look for a pulse. When the doors were open, Alfred Hendriks’ one visible eye looked past my shoulder, admiring a view I hoped not to see for a long time. He hadn’t been planning on it himself as late as yesterday. It made you think about tomorrow.

  Not for long, though. I put away the gun and stepped inside to search those pockets I could reach without disturbing the body. You never know what might show up in a lab these days. His wallet held cab fare and enough cards in plastic windows to clear up the deficit, at least until the bills came. I put it back and took out a leather folder containing the keys to his Porsche and a couple of oth
ers. That I pocketed. The contact my hands made with his skin told me he’d begun to cool but not yet to stiffen.

  That was as much as his body could tell me. I couldn’t be any more thorough without getting blood on my hands and clothes. (“Kind of sloppy with the spaghetti sauce there. Walker. You won’t mind if Forensics has a look at your tie.”) I left him, not paying much attention now to how much noise I was making. Whoever had done the shooting was as long gone as the smell of spent powder.

  Hendriks’ name was lettered in gold on a frosted panel in the front corridor. The first key I tried unlocked the door. More cold-blooded design had gone into this office than into Marianne’s downriver: From deep red pile to hand-rubbed walnut to thick unread first editions on built-in shelves the place was rigged for power. Even the window was bigger, although not nearly as large as the one in Commodore Stutch’s study in Crosse Pointe. The chairs were covered in maroon leather and an Impressionist painting of a locomotive charging through a misty night hung in a heavy gilt frame on one wall. The artist had left it unsigned, but the odds said he was French and dead.

  I lifted a corner of the painting, looked at bare paneling behind it, and let it back down. I inspected the carpeting around the desk but there were no breaks or seams where a floor safe might have been installed. The desk was tidy, with no papers or folders left on top. Even the calendar was bare of notations. A neat man, Hendriks. Or a careful one. The drawers were locked. I selected the smallest key on the ring, inserted it in the slot in the top drawer, and turned it. Somewhere inside, a bar slid out of a track, releasing all the drawers.

  I wasted time on pencils and stationery until I reached the second drawer on the right side. There a basket rack had been mounted to hold half a dozen computer disks upright in paper sleeves. Each pocket except two was labeled in neat felt-tip capitals on strips of masking tape; current and projected expenditures and profits and monthly business correspondence were all assigned to their proper pockets, each sleeve marked accordingly to keep them from getting mixed up. The remaining two pockets were blank. One of them was empty. I drew the disk out of the other. The sleeve was blank as well. I put them in my coat pocket.