Downriver

by Loren D. Estleman

  It took an hour longer than I’d expected. Even then I missed it the first time and had to turn back on a hunch. It claimed two inches of the city section between an interview with Mayor Cavanaugh and an illustrated advertisement for Listerine that promised an end to sore throats caused by viruses. “CITY CIRL KILLED IN AUTO MISHAP,” read the headline. I digested all it had to offer in ten seconds and turned, unenlightened, to the obituaries.

  SOUWAINE, MARY FRANCES

  Aged 19, died suddenly Monday, Oct. 14. Born May 11,1949, in Birmingham, Ala., daughter Harold and Mary Katherine (Joiner) Souwaine. They preceded her in death. Moved to Detroit 1967. Attended Wayne State University. Survived by a sister, Edith. No services planned. Donations in lieu of flowers to the National Highway Safety Council.

  I read it through twice. Then I put back the microfilms, found some more recent ones in another drawer, and spent another hour with them. They only went back five years, but they made me feel just as old.

  The little parking lot on West Grand River was as barren as a proving ground. I crossed the street on foot against no traffic at all and used my key in the front door because the super had locked up and gone home. He had stopped living on the premises after a black revolutionary had cut loose at me with a light assault rifle in the foyer. It’s a lonely sort of life but not always dull.

  My building was quieter than the library, quieter even than the Detroit office of Marianne Motors with Hendriks dead in the elevator and the doors bumping him like amateur pallbearers trying to carry a coffin through a narrow doorway. The stairwell echoed and the hallway on my floor with its dingy linoleum and impertinent new suspended ceiling might have belonged to an evacuated shelter. I was alone. Even rats don’t hang around a place where there is no promise of food. The busted brokers, dirty-nailed tailors, credit dentists with Mexican degrees, chiropractors, sign painters, orange-haired cosmeticians, electrical contractors, legal experts with malfeasance suits pending, TV repairmen, palmsters, tattoo artists, carpet salesmen, escort pimps, bookies, clowns, geeks, freaks, Sikhs, mercenaries and model agencies, martial-arts instructors with greasy smocks and tattered eastern philosophies, all the floating jetsam from the higher rents downtown, were home living their lives or away trying to forget them. I felt like the last whooping crane.

  A shadow fell across me while I was unlocking the door to my outer office. I knew who it was without turning around. I pushed the door open and stood clear to let him inside.

  27

  I SET THE BOTTLE and a glass on the desk. DeVries ignored the glass, fisted the bottle, and pointed the base at the ceiling. It glugged twice and he pounded it back down and swept a flanneled arm across his mouth. Sweat broke out in studs on his forehead when the heat hit his belly. I turned on the fan and pushed some stale air around.

  “Stuff tastes like piss,” he said. “You drink it all the time?”

  “It loses something without the ceremony.” I sat down and put my feet on the scribble pad. “Hot, isn’t it? Especially where you are.”

  “Guy left his office open next door.”

  “Who let you into the building?”

  “Little Jewish guy on his way out. I said I had an appointment with you. He said not to make no holes in the walls. What’d he mean?”

  “Insider humor. He recognize you?”

  “Didn’t act like it.”

  “If he did he wouldn’t do anything about it. Rosekrantz doesn’t even mind his own business.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d show today, but I couldn’t stay where I was.”

  “No Sundays in this work. Drop a load.”

  He remained standing. “I didn’t do it.”

  I picked up the bottle and shook what was left. “I just watched you.”

  “Kill Hendriks, I mean. That wasn’t mine.”

  “How’d you find out the cops wanted you for it?”

  “Seen them watching the hotel yesterday. They didn’t see me. I went down an alley. After that I went—”

  “For a walk. Don’t tell me where. So far I can beat the harboring rap. Where were you yesterday morning?”

  “At the Alamo. You seen me there.”

  “Before that.”

  “I was there all morning till you came with that St. George.”

  “St. Charles. Where’d you go after I left?”

  “Mt. Elliott Cemetery. I was meeting somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman.”

  “The one whose call you were expecting?”

  “Yeah. She didn’t show.”

  “Name.”

  “I don’t know. She called before, said she had the money Hendriks owed me and not to tell nobody. She was scared of him finding out. Said she’d call back to set up the meet. She did, after you left.”

  “Anybody see you there?”

  “Some bums. I walked. I waited two hours and then I gave up and went home. That’s when I seen the cops sitting outside waiting.”

  “You should’ve told me.”

  “She said not. I didn’t want to scare her off.”

  “You couldn’t scare her if you’d walked in with your head under your arm.”

  “You know who it was?”

  “I know someone wanted you someplace where no reliable witnesses could place you at the time Alfred Hendriks was killed. That’s twice in twenty years you’ve had a frame hung on you the same way. Didn’t Marquette teach you anything?”

  “They got some bad dudes inside,” he said. “I thought they got them all.”

  “They don’t make that much barbed wire.”

  He sat down then. He was wearing the clothes I’d seen him in the day before. “So what’d you find out?”

  “The good news is I found someone who can pin Hendriks to the robbery.”

  He watched me and said nothing. That’s the trouble with good news-bad news jokes; they depend too much on who’s listening. I gave up. “He won’t come forward. He’d only implicate himself. But I know who killed Hendriks. If I work it right I can get you clear of that.”

  “What about the money?”

  “The money’s gone. Forget the money. If I had the money right now I’d use that fan to blow it out the window and watch the traffic back up. The trouble with you, besides being too damn big, is you think because they dressed you up like a citizen and let you through the gate you’re out of prison. You’re not, as long as you keep worrying about what you’ve got coming to you.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I’m going to go talk to Hendriks’ killer. You’re going to turn yourself in if you don’t want to wind up dead on a sidewalk because you didn’t hear a cop tell you to throw up your hands the first time.”

  “You going to turn me in if I don’t?”

  “You bet. I’ll hit you on the head with this desk and wrap you in the rug like Cleopatra and carry you there under one arm. Let the cops do their own job if you won’t.”

  “Well, I won’t.”

  “I never thought you would. Sit tight.” I picked up the telephone.

  “Who you calling?”

  I was dialing. “Relax. Does this look like nine-one-one?”

  “What’s nine-one-one?”

  “Sí?” A woman’s voice.

  “Elda?” I said.

  “Sí.”

  “This is Mr. Walker. I almost had lunch there yesterday.

  “Sí.”

  “Is either Mr. or Mrs. Marianne at home?”

  “No.”

  At least it was a change. “Where’s Mr. Marianne?”

  “He say downriver.”

  “What’s he doing at the plant on a Sunday?”

  “Meeting, he say. About Señor Hendriks.”

  “What about Mrs. Marianne?”

  “Exercise. She run.”

  This was getting to be like pulling boxcars. “When do you expect her back?”

  “No sé.”

  “Can you take a message?”

  “Sí.” Paper rust
led.

  “Tell her I know who killed Hendriks. I’m going to see her husband about it now.”

  I made sure she had it, then depressed the plunger. I let it up and dialed again. This call was quicker. I didn’t use any names.

  “I’m coming along,” DeVries said.

  “I figured you would. You’ll have to scrunch down in the back seat in case we pull up alongside any prowl cars at traffic lights.”

  “It wouldn’t be anything like I ain’t been doing since yesterday.”

  I took the West German revolver George St. Charles had given me out of the drawer and slapped it down in front of him. “If you get caught with this maybe they’ll let us be roommates. Use your left hand and keep it away from your face if you have to fire it. My advice is don’t. These days the Krauts make better cars than they do guns.”

  He picked it up and examined it, then stood and stuck it inside his pants, pulling his shirttail out to cover the butt.

  “Where’s yours?”

  “Collecting rust in the property room at thirteen hundred. I’ll use the Luger.” I got up. “You won’t mind if we swing west to pick someone up.”

  “Guy you just called?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The cop who arrested you.”

  He met us at the door, buttoning up a black nylon shirt with white orchids on it. He had on gray flannel trousers and his feet were shod in black high-tops with brass hooks and steel toes. His scalp gleamed through his short bristly pinkish hair, but he looked younger than he had relaxing in the backyard with his wife and grandchildren, the air was charged, as if a big jet had just passed over, or maybe it was the situation. “Come ahead in,” he said. “I’m just — ” He saw my client looming behind me.

  “Floyd Orlander, Richard DeVries,” I said. “You might remember each other.”

  “Lieutenant.”

  Orlander looked at me. “He still wanted?”

  “If he weren’t I would’ve called the cops instead of you.”

  “If you told me he was in it I would of said no.”

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

  He hadn’t moved from the doorway. “In the old days I played nice sometimes with pimps and stickup guys. I had to to get what I was after. Not with pushers or killers, though. Never once. I’m not about to break a perfect record just because I’m retired.”

  “I got as close as I’m ever likely to get to a confession from Sherman Miskoupolis that his family turned around the money from that armored job for Alfred Hendriks. Hendriks killed Davy Jackson. Not DeVries.”

  “Sherman Miskoupolis, of the Miskoupolis brothers?”

  “I hope there’s just the one family. The name’s too hard to pronounce.”

  “I met Ari one time and I helped investigate after they scraped Nick off the pavement in Greektown. It should of happened to all three of them. Anyway I was talking about the Hendriks kill.”

  “He didn’t do Hendriks either. We’re on our way to meet the killer. You coming or not? You said you wanted to see this through.”

  “Who’s the killer?”

  “You didn’t pay to see that hand.”

  “Man, I hope you know how lucky you are I mellowed.” He made chewing motions with his big jaw. Then he looked up at DeVries. “You got bald.”

  “You got old,” DeVries said.

  “Old’s better than bald.”

  “I can put on a hat.”

  Orlander turned around and walked away from the door, leaving it open. DeVries and I went inside. In the dining room Orlander took a key down from the high top of an antique china cabinet and unlocked a drawer in the base.

  “Where’s your wife?” I asked.

  “I sent her to visit the kids. Said some old friends from the department were coming and the language could get unrefined.”

  “She buy it?”

  “Not for a damn second. But she went.” He took a glistening brown leather rig out of the drawer and climbed into it. “Ever wear one of these?” He snapped the bottom of the holster to his belt and adjusted the elastic strap across his back.

  “Years ago. Felt like a goiter.”

  “Still does. But those belt clips are hell on the kidneys. What are you carrying?”

  I showed him the Luger. I’d put on my jacket to conceal it.

  “Shit. That Fred Flintstone action’s what lost them the war. Here’s a gun.” He lifted the top off a pasteboard box in the drawer and picked up a square black automatic pistol with a checked grip.

  “Nine-millimeter,” I said. “Lieutenant Alderdyce said you had a smaller Beretta.”

  “Never heard of him. That seven-sixty-five was too light. Almost got me killed once.” He popped the magazine, looked at the cartridges, heeled it back in, and racked one into the chamber. He holstered the weapon. “Dottie wants me to get rid of it on account of the kids. Women teaching kids to be scared of guns is what’s got this world in deep shit. What’s King Kong carrying? Don’t tell me he just wears his shirts sloppy.”

  I said, “You don’t want to see it.”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse.”

  “That’s the trouble with this place. Nobody’s got no pride. Where we headed?”

  “The Marianne plant.”

  “How you figure to get past Security?”

  “I thought I’d wing it. It’s not that great there.”

  “They see you before?”

  “Just once.”

  “That’s plenty. Wait here.” He went through the dining room arch.

  DeVries stood around looking big and quiet. I asked him how he was doing.

  “I got my description on every police radio in three counties and I’m standing in a white cop’s house. If I was doing much better I’d be in the gas chamber.”

  “They don’t do that here. Yet. They’d give you a hundred years tops.”

  “Hell, I’ll probably be dead by then.”

  Orlander came back with a gray felt hat and stuck it out. “Pull this on.”

  It was too big. I tucked the top half of an ear inside the crown and tugged the brim down over my right eye. Dick Tracy looked back at me from the glass in the china cabinet.

  “Nothing changes a face like a hat,” Orlander said. “You be the mean one. If we do it right they won’t ask to see our shields.”

  “We look kind of casual for cops.”

  “How many neckties you see on Sunday? Plainclothes means plain clothes.”

  “What do we put on DeVries?”

  “DeVries stays in the car.”

  “I don’t like splitting up.”

  “We could have him go in on his hands and knees and tell them we’re with the Canine Corps.”

  “I didn’t come this far to sit in no back seat,” the big man said.

  “It’s how it gets done, junior.” Orlander pulled a thin green sweater on over the shoulder rig. “Otherwise it gets done without me. Which means it don’t get done.”

  I said, “He’s right. They take one look at you and we’ll be up to our eyebrows in real cops.”

  “Our eyebrows,” Orlander said. “Your ass.”

  “We don’t need him.”

  “We need him,” I said. “Last time we hit a Marianne office it was just the hired help. This time we’re dealing with the first string.”

  “Ain’t nothing changed. It was the Man when I went in and it’s still the Man.”

  Orlander stepped up to him. The top of his head came to DeVries’s sternum. “Don’t fuck with me, boy.”

  “Don’t call me boy, fuck.”

  “God bless us every one,” I said.

  28

  IT WAS THE KIND of Sunday afternoon that’s wasted on cities, custom-built for chicken and dumplings after church and playing checkers on the front porch. The sun was Crayola yellow in a scrubbed sky with chunky clouds lying on it as motionless as old men in a park. Buildings floated on layers of rippling heat. The skyline w
as sharp at the edges, as if cut out with a steel punch, and the pavement made sucking sounds as our tires rolled over it.

  We took the Edsel Ford east from Romulus and turned south on the John Lodge past the empty haunted skeletons of Wonder Bread and Vernor’s, putting more distance between ourselves and chicken and dumplings every block. On West Jefferson the river caught the light in little platinum bursts, reminding me of Lake Superior as seen from Marquette. We drove along entire streets without meeting another car. Short of an air raid, nothing empties a city faster than a nice weekend.

  Floyd Orlander rode with his window cranked down and his eyes on the road ahead, flicking them to the side only to note each street sign automatically as we passed it. His brutal profile never stirred. DeVries lay hunched on the floor of the back seat. Every time he moved to relieve a cramped muscle, my seat strained forward. The little Renault labored under the extra weight.

  “I don’t get this Hendriks at all,” Orlander said, when we were stopped for a light in River Rouge. There was no traffic going in either direction. “My old man carried car batteries up and down three flights of stairs for twenty years. I had to get a job to finish high school. If I had an economics scholarship to England I sure wouldn’t hit no armored car.”

  “Bet you would for two hundred large,” DeVries said.

  “Too much risk. And he couldn’t know there was that much. The guards stretched their route that day to cut down on the number of trips.”

  “It wasn’t just the money.” The light changed and I crossed the intersection. “Some people are honest because they’re honest. Just as many or maybe more never do anything dishonest because they don’t get the chance or they’re afraid they’ll get caught. You’re a college kid pulling down a buck and a half an hour doing the books in a print shop and it’s fine until the dam bursts. DeVries said it: Everyone around you is breaking the law, smashing and burning and boosting merchandise and the cops are letting it happen for the most part because it’s gotten too big for them. Then your boss tells you to tot up the accounts because he’s shipping them out tomorrow in a lot with every other business in the neighborhood. It’s the money, but not just that. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and you’ve got at least twenty-four hours to decide what you’ll do with it.”