Downriver

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I never bought that help-a-good-boy-go-bad shit.”

  “Nobody does. There’s no such thing as corrupting a person. There has to be a foothold to begin with. Hendriks was a firecracker waiting to go off, though maybe he never knew it. So was DeVries, only in a different way. One robbed, the other burned. The rules were suspended and the opportunity was there.”

  “Wasn’t the same at all,” DeVries said. “I was drunk and black.”

  Orlander said, “Bullshit. Your kind gets a boil on your ass, it’s because you’re black.”

  “You ever been?”

  “No. I got a boil just the same.”

  “Don’t it give you a headache?”

  “Fellas.” I passed a line of bicyclists in helmets pedaling along the shoulder. “Hendriks was drunk too, in his way. People who work with money love it. They’ll say it’s figures they love, but take away the dollar sign and they lose interest in a fat hurry. But it’s the sixties and love and peace are supposed to be more important. You’ve got a hippie girlfriend who believes it, or pretends to, and anybody who’s been force-fed that wall-poster philosophy along with the usual hallucinogens is a ready tool. Maybe you tell her you’ll give the money to some cult group or a Democrat.

  “Davy Jackson you handle a little differently. He’s drunk almost as often as he’s black, and a big heist under those circumstances is just another way of Getting His. He’s like DeVries that way.”

  “Reason enough for DeVries to be in on it,” Orlander said.

  “Go to hell.”

  “Not near enough,” I said. “He’s got a shot at professional basketball and he’s engaged to be married. If the first doesn’t change your perspective, the second sure does. I’ve seen you with your grandchildren and I know you know what I’m talking about. But he’s drunk and black too, so him you take in partway and don’t tell him the rest. You play him the way you play the girlfriend and Jackson, only with different pieces. Hendriks was the only one in the game with all the pieces. In a little over a year, two of the others were dead and the third was in prison. Hendriks quit winners.”

  “Until yesterday,” said Orlander.

  “That’s the trouble with winning. There’s always a challenger.”

  The gate was open, the employee parking lot filled. There are no Sundays in the automobile industry either. I steered around the building and parked in the little lot off the executive entrance. Timothy Marianne’s Stiletto was there, with a plate reading TIMTOP. There was no sign of Mrs. Marianne’s car.

  “How many on the desk?” Orlander asked.

  “Just one in front,” I said. “Back here I don’t know. I didn’t go in this door.”

  “I’ll talk. You snarl every little.” He opened his door.

  DeVries winched himself up onto the back seat, filling the rearview mirror. “What do I do, sit here and play the radio?”

  “Slide down if any other cars show up,” I said. “Wait for whoever it is to get inside, then lay on the horn.”

  “Who you expecting?”

  “A good-looking redhead driving a maroon Turbo Saab.”

  “What the hell’s a Turbo Sob?”

  “You’ll know it when you see it.” I put a foot on the pavement.

  “I ain’t sitting here all day counting license plates.”

  “Give us twenty minutes. Otherwise wait for a signal. Then come in hard, but don’t kill anyone.”

  “Twenty minutes is a long time.”

  “Not compared to twenty years.”

  The steel fire door looked like the one on the employees’ entrance in front. This one was locked. Orlander squashed the button on an intercom mounted next to it.

  “Yes?” A masculine, radio-modulated voice. They’ve developed most of the tinniness out of closed-circuit communication.

  “Open up.”

  “Whom do you represent?”

  Orlander looked at me. “Did he say whom?”

  “Yeah. Let’s make him eat it.”

  “Whom do you represent?” the voice repeated.

  “The next forty-eight hours of your life, junior, if you don’t open up before we shoot off the lock. That’s the standard drop for interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty.”

  “You’re the police?”

  “Man’s got a lot of questions,” Orlander said.

  “Let’s throw him in with some fag bikers.”

  “I don’t think we got any.”

  “We’ll arrest some,” I said.

  “Hang on,” said the voice.

  A buzzer razzed. Orlander turned the knob and we went inside. The guard was sitting in front of six television screens on a console. He was my age, trim, and tall-looking in a gray uniform with the tie tucked inside his shirt. He wore steel-rimmed aviator’s glasses and a revolver in a spring clip on his hip.

  “Lookit the soldier suit,” I said.

  He was staring at Orlander. “You’re kind of old for a police officer.”

  I said, “He got gray watching me bounce cheap rentals off the ceiling.”

  “Shut up. Where’s your boss, junior?”

  “The security chief?” He adjusted his glasses. “He’s not—”

  “I mean the big kahuna. Where is he?”

  “Mr. Marianne?”

  Orlander looked at me. “He’s just as dumb in person.”

  “He’ll smarten up when those bikers start getting friendly.”

  “Bwana Marianne, junior. The chairman of the board. The head honcho. The high colonic. The jerk that owns this building and your brass buttons. It’s about his general manager that got himself dead yesterday. You read about it after the funnies.”

  “He doesn’t read,” I said. “He cleans his gun and thinks about Clint Eastwood.”

  The guard colored. “There’s no reason —”

  I took a step forward and ran into Orlander’s arm. “Tear him up on your own time,” he said. “You got your job, junior, we got ours. Just point us his way and we’ll be out of your life like last year’s calendar.”

  “He’s on the floor, talking to the employees.”

  “You wouldn’t be just telling us that so you can call up to his office and tell him we’re coming,” Orlander said.

  “See for yourself.”

  Marianne’s lanky, loosely clad frame slouched on one of the TV monitors with his hands in his pockets, facing a crowd of coveralled men from a low catwalk over a conveyor. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in a while, but it could have been the black-and-white photography. There was no sound.

  “Where might that be, junior?”

  “Through there.” The guard pointed at a pair of swinging doors with square grilled windows. “You’ll need these.”

  Orlander snatched the yellow Lucite tags off the guard’s palm and gave me one. We put them in our pockets.

  “They’re supposed to be worn on the outside.”

  “It’s okay, junior. We’re plainclothesmen.”

  At the doors I turned around, went back to the console, and pulled the telephone out of the wall. It took two yanks. I handed the frayed end of the cord to the guard. “Charge it to the city.”

  “What about your badges?” he said.

  The doors swung to behind us.

  “Fucking ham,” said Orlander.

  “Don’t blame me,” I said. “Your good cop is most cops’ bad cop.”

  We were in a corridor done in yellow tile without a window or door on either side. There was another set of swinging doors at the other end with red letters on a white sign reading SAFETY GLASSES BEYOND THIS POINT. Timothy Marianne’s voice droned on the other side. We pushed through into the plant proper.

  29

  THIS SECTION WAS ONE of the few remaining from the old tractor plant. Thick mullioned windows the size of garage doors lined the walls from just below the twenty-foot ceiling to within eight feet of the floor. Between them was bare brick, with exposed girders crisscrossing overhead and a freshly p
oured concrete floor going white in mottled patches. A railed catwalk six feet high circled the walls, stepped ladders on all four sides leading down from them to the floor, where a row of Stiletto chassis stood on a stopped conveyor belt. Space-age robot limbs posed along the belt with their drills, torches, and high-speed sanders pointed ceilingward like weapons at parade rest. In the aisles between the belt and the catwalks, fifty or sixty workers in gray coveralls stood looking up at Timothy Marianne slouched behind the railing.

  “… died while at work for the company he did so much to help build,” he was saying. “Why he died isn’t our concern. What is our concern is that we continue to work together as we have from the beginning to ensure that the dream he gave his life for becomes fact. It’s as much of a monument as Al would care to have, and greater than most.”

  At his side and a little behind him hovered a large black man in coveralls with his hands on his hips and his head down, listening. He’d be the foreman. Orlander and I had come out onto a catwalk adjoining theirs, angled across from them. Our path was blocked by a white vinyl-covered kitchen chair with steel tubing where the foreman probably sat when the conveyor was moving. Rather than call attention to ourselves by moving it we stayed where we were.

  “I know there are rumors among you already that Al was into something that got too big for him,” Marianne said. “None of them has any foundation. From the beginning he invested his time and skills and most of his personal finances into this plant and the great mechanism behind it. Put simply, without Al Hendriks there would be no Marianne Motors. I can’t stop the speculation, but I won’t have him tried and condemned because he had the temerity to be killed in a violent age.

  “Many of you are wondering about the future of Marianne Motors. You are its future. Which direction it takes is entirely up to you. As long as you and those who come after you continue to show the dedication and loyalty you have so far, the firm will go on. And now I’ve kept you from your work long enough.”

  There was a little silence after he finished. Then someone clapped and someone else took it up and applause crackled through the crowd. It rose when Marianne lifted his right hand in his characteristic wave and died quickly as he turned to leave. At its peak it wouldn’t have drawn a second curtain call at the Fischer Theater. At the labor level, pep talks are followed by pink slips too often to get excited about.

  Marianne stopped when he saw us. “How did you get past Security?”

  “What Security?” Orlander said. “Captain Video in the back room?”

  “Who are you?”

  Whatever answer he might have made was drowned out when the conveyor started with a report like a pistol shot. Then the robots with drills and sanders and welding torches cut in, sparks splattered, and the air grew sharp with the stench of scorched metal. The foreman had gone down to supervise the startup. I raised my voice. “There someplace we can talk without yelling?”

  “Say what you have to say right here. I have a business to put back together.”

  “I thought the Hendriks kill wasn’t no more than pissing in Niagara,” Orlander said.

  “Who is he?” Marianne asked me.

  “A friend. You throw a stirring rally. Things that bad?”

  “Unless you’re a stockholder I don’t see that it’s your business.”

  “I know who killed Hendriks.”

  “Take off that hat. You don’t look the least bit like Harrison Ford.”

  I’d forgotten I was wearing it. I removed it and tossed it onto the seat of the foreman’s chair. It hadn’t been needed anyway. Marianne came around the corner and stopped on the other side of the chair. “Who?”

  “You should have asked that right away,” I said. “I might have believed you didn’t know.”

  “I know, all right. It was your client. You’re hiding him, I suppose.”

  “We’re not talking about DeVries and you know it. That bewildered air doesn’t cut it anymore. You’re too shrewd a businessman not to suspect the real killer.”

  He put his hands back in his pockets. “Suppose you explain.”

  “It’s all craft. The neglected hair and clothes, the careless posture, the outward appearance of boyish innocence; that whole inverted corporate polish is obvious enough to fool the business world, but cops are used to obvious ploys. They’d see through it the way a kid sees through a professional magician. It’s a weapon against nonliteral minds, just like Commodore Stutch’s age. You know, all right.”

  Orlander said, “I don’t.”

  “Every case needs a place to start,” I said. “After I’d heard enough of DeVries’s story to buy it I started on Hendriks. Prison’s a little like going blind. The last thing you see before you get cut off stays with you. Years later he recognized Marianne’s general manager in a photograph as the Wayne State student who encouraged him to throw that firebomb.” I looked at Marianne. “The second time Hendriks stonewalled me, in your office, I followed him to your house and saw him pick up your wife and drive away with her.”

  He laughed easily. “So I found out they were having an affair and killed him. How Napoleonic.”

  “I can see she told you about it after I confronted her. I thought she would. It might have been anything or nothing. Extramarital flings among couples at your social level aren’t exactly special bulletins. When Hendriks turned up dead the next day, a lazy cop might have made jealousy the motive and gone after you. It was too much coincidence for me.

  “Setting that aside, I had to consider the possibility that my client killed Hendriks. That stuck me square in the middle. If I proved DeVries’s story I established a motive. His alibi, that a woman who wouldn’t identify herself called him to set up a meeting to arrange a payoff and then didn’t show, stunk. The murder fit him too well so I set that aside too.”

  “Your logic is selective,” Marianne said. Smoke from the abraded metal on the line enveloped his legs. We were standing directly under one of the ventilators mounted above the windows.

  “That left Hendriks’ second set of books. It pointed to any one of a number of multinational corporations he’d been fleecing, including the ancient and malevolent firm of Icepick & Garrote. Not that any of the higher profiles on Wall Street would be squeamish about murder either. They finance wars and foreign assassinations. A little domestic snuffing would come under the heading of minor adjustments.”

  “You’re lying. Al was a lot of things but he wouldn’t have sold out the company.”

  “Two point eight times,” I said, “according to an accountant I had look at the two computer disks Hendriks had squirreled away. But in my business, evidence that comes that easy is automatically tainted. SOP in that situation is to look in the opposite direction.”

  Orlander said, “So far you’ve eliminated every suspect but DeVries.”

  “Not every one. Someone’s still unaccounted for. Let’s go back twenty years. We know, or we suspect, that Hendriks and Davy Jackson pulled off the actual heist of that armored car on Brady in 1967. DeVries torched the empty building to create a diversion, although he didn’t know that’s what he was doing. That leaves the wheel man. Hendriks would have had one. He was too practical to leave the getaway car unguarded in the middle of a riot.”

  “The broad,” Orlander said.

  “His girlfriend, Frances Souwaine, was a fellow student at Wayne State. She had priors for soliciting and possession of narcotics, which was part of the pattern back then, especially for an Alabama girl trying to make her way in the big northern city after the death of her parents. DeVries said she was a hippie. She looked like one and she was living with a man outside of wedlock and no doubt she had the standard things to say against the Establishment, but that prostitution record suggests she was more mercenary than the average run. So handling the wheel during the big caper wouldn’t have seemed out of line. We may never know what she thought when Hendriks gunned down one of his own men during the getaway, or if she was in on that part of the plan from the start, o
r if she even saw it. The reason we’ll never know is she was killed in an auto accident fifteen months later.”

  Orlander said, “Hendriks?”

  “I thought about it. Probably not. If he were going to take her out he wouldn’t have waited that long, and he might have been in England at the time. It could have been suicide. At least that’s what her sister thinks.”

  Marianne kept his hands in his pockets. I’d been right about him. The tighter his situation the more casual he seemed.

  “I looked up the accident,” I said. “ The newspaper account didn’t tell me as much as Frances Souwaine’s obituary in the same issue. She left only one survivor, a sister named Edith.”

  “I suppose you got all hot and bothered over finding such a common name twice in one case,” Marianne said.

  “Don’t knock hot and bothered. Sometimes it’s the only fuel you’ve got. Mrs. Marianne told me her sister was killed in an accident that may or may not have been deliberate on the sister’s part. It’s conceivable that two transplanted Southerners named Edith lost sisters in accidents. Two named Edith Souwaine is stretching it. That was your wife’s maiden name. I looked up the story on your wedding.”

  “You sorry trash.”

  “Her sister took part in the armored. Somewhere along the line she told Edith all about it, and then she killed herself on the road. It doesn’t much matter if it was conscious or unconscious. She had helped Hendriks commit robbery and been an accomplice to murder and then he left her here to bog down in that drugged Morning After that her kind woke up to in the sixties while he went to England. Maybe he planned to give her her cut; probably not. He’d already killed to sweeten his end. She couldn’t get to the money —it was with the Miskoupolis brothers getting scrubbed clean — and she couldn’t threaten to go to the cops because she was just as guilty. He used her up and threw her over and she worried at it until she’d worried herself to death. But Edith was stronger stuff.