Downriver

by Loren D. Estleman

  One of the better-looking cops in the Criminal Investigation Division was showing some leg on the edge of Sergeant Cranmer’s desk in Robbery, reading items from a hot sheet in her hand over the telephone. She had her brown hair pinned back to beat the heat and a couple of buttons undone on a gray silk blouse to raise the temperature of everyone else in the squad room. Her skirt was matador red and just a little less than knee-length when she was sitting, dangling a silver sandal off her right foot. She answered to Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler.

  “Demoted?” I asked when she had hung up.

  “Cranmer’s out sick. I’m adding his job to the three others I’ve been doing since Easter.” She adjusted her tortoiseshell rims. “Is there something wrong with your neck, or are you working on your Cary Grant?”

  “Honorable injury. I’ve been out diving for the Edmund Fitzgerald. Alderdyce around? He isn’t in his office.”

  “Turn around, Mr. Detective,” she said.

  I’d walked right past him. He had his broad back to me at the copying machine by the door, coatless, with his salmon-colored shirt pasted to his skin in patches and the curved grip of his department .38 hooking his right kidney. I flipped Lieutenant Thaler a salute and left her.

  John Alderdyce jumped a foot when I used his name. He turned his dark hacked-out face on me. “Why don’t you use a cattle prod?” he snapped. “I haven’t killed a man since supper last night. My average is slipping.”

  “Next time I’ll whistle. What put you on the stick?”

  “The heat. The crime statistics. Double shifts. Everybody calls in sick when the sun comes out. Having rank means you get to keep everyone else’s job for them. If you’re really lucky you’ll make commissioner and die before you’re fifty. How the hell are you?”

  “My neck hurts. But I’m working. Can we talk in your office? Soon as you’re through making copies of your hand.”

  The machine had kicked out four sheets while his left palm was resting on the glass. He swore and turned it off. “Doing khaki work now, for chrissake. Next they’ll have me scrubbing toilets. Let’s make it quick.”

  I held the door while he drummed the copies together and tipped them into a tattered interoffice envelope. On the way out he glimpsed Mary Ann Thaler, making another call at the sergeant’s desk. “You ought to spring for dinner sometime,” he told me. “You two might wind up married and raising little sleuths in West Bloomfield.”

  “I never date cops. Just when you’re ready to pop the question over candles they decide to bust the violinist for disturbing the peace. They’re as romantic as a soft-nosed slug.” I fell into step beside him in the hallway.

  “Suit yourself. I bet she’s warm and smells like pink soap. I bet she wears shortie p.j.’s.”

  “Under or over the shoulder holster?”

  “Look who’s romantic.”

  “How’s Marian?”

  “Edgy as hell. Too early to tell if we belong back together. The kids are great. Most of their friends have parents with different zip codes.”

  In Homicide he dumped the envelope on the desk of a young plainclothesman in a T-shirt and seersucker coat. “Where were you when I needed these done?” Alderdyce demanded. “Mail them out to the precincts. Maybe we’ll have an arrest for Christmas.”

  The officer pulled out the top sheet. Alderdyce’s hand had photographed darker than it was. “I thought these guys went out when Prohibition came in.”

  Alderdyce snatched it away and crumpled it. “Buy a necktie. This is a police station, not a mission.”

  “Yes, sir. Lieutenant.”

  “Don’t yessir me, boy. I’m not your grampa.”

  “Yes, sir. I mean yes. I mean no.”

  “Kids dress like bums. Can’t tell who’s doing the booking and who’s doing the getting booked.” In his office he slap-shot the crumpled paper into the wastebasket, then used the vanity mirror on the wall to straighten his necktie. He turned down and buttoned his cuffs and took his coat off the hanger. It fit him like new skin. Good tailoring was one of his vices. “What’s your beef?”

  “I need a line on an old case. It goes back to the riots.”

  “We were in high school then. Which case?”

  “An arson and a robbery on Brady. A building was set on fire and an armored car tapped for two hundred thousand.”

  “Richard DeVries.”

  I kicked the door shut. The sound of typing in the squad room drifted in over the top of the glass partitions. “That came out quick.”

  “Somewhere in this mess is a Telex from the State Department of Corrections with a list of the cons getting sprung this month.” He waved a hand at the pile of folders and envelopes on his desk. “We get it with the gas bill. I try to stay on top of it. He’s in town?”

  “Seeing his parole officer today. First order of business is I’m informing you I’m looking into his arrest. Just in case you’ve got objections to a civilian rooting around in an old police matter.”

  “By the book. My, my.”

  “I use it when I can. Second, assuming there are no objections — ”

  “A big assume.”

  “ — is I’d like to talk with the detective in charge of the investigation. I’m told his name is Floyd Orlander.”

  “Before my time.”

  “Dead?”

  “Retired. Accepted with the chief’s regrets, I hear, and three hip-hip-hoorays and a Hail Mary from the chain of command in between. Legends are hard to work with. You remember the shoot-out in Judge Lorenzo’s courtroom?”

  “Defense attorney pulled a piece on the witness on the stand and got turned into macrame by the cops in the gallery.”

  “And by the witness on the stand, who happened to be Lieutenant Floyd Orlander. The judge kept his own .45 auto strapped to his ribs under his robes and got down and crawled for the door to his chambers. What you didn’t hear was that after the incident, the shooting team found a line of bullet holes four to twelve inches above the floor in the oak paneling behind the bench, or that the slugs they dug out of the wood belonged to Orlander’s seven-point-six-five off-duty be-the-first-kid-on-your-block-to-own-one Beretta. The lawyer who started the whole thing got chopped down standing six feet away. The only target anywhere near the floor was the famous four-footed judge.”

  I rubbed my neck. He went on.

  “The thing might’ve gone further if every cop in the department didn’t hate Let-em-go Lorenzo’s guts and if Orlander’s record on the range wasn’t so good. He hadn’t really been trying to hit the little bastard, you see. Anyway Orlander took early retirement with encouragement, Lorenzo left the bench for private practice, and I hear he hasn’t taken a crap since that day.”

  “Do it in Detroit,” I said.

  “Things are better now. At least we stopped shooting at each other.” He picked up a fat folder and started thumbing through its contents. “Orlander was living in Romulus last I heard. If you still want to talk to him I can get his address from Personnel.”

  “I’d appreciate it. Also the name of the sergeant who sided him on the DeVries case if you know it.”

  “DeVries the client?”

  I nodded.

  “What’s he want, the money?”

  That struck too close. I said, “He claims he wasn’t part of the robbery. He wants me to find out who was.”

  “You mean he wants you to locate them so he can bleed them. The statute ran out a long time ago on the heist, but there’s that murder still laying there like a dog turd waiting for someone to step in it. DeVries took the drop and he thinks he’s owed.”

  “If that’s what he wants and it turns out he’s telling the truth about the job, maybe he is.”

  “Funny, there’s nothing on the books about which thief gets title to the booty. So it is the money.”

  “I said if. I look for missing people and insurance frauds. Shaking people down requires a whole different set of skills. All I’m after is the straight dope.”

  He flipp
ed the folder back onto the pile. “The state house is full of innocents. This one waited a long time to find someone who bought his story.”

  “The thought crossed my mind. Somebody wants him stopped, but that could mean anything. Your enemies don’t all dry up and blow away just because they can you up for twenty years. But the P.I. business is rotten with grifters he wouldn’t have to lie to for their help in an extortion. He picked me.”

  “Not my toy soldier. I hope. Ask Orlander who his partner was. What do I look like, the department historian?”

  He found a letterhead in a drawer and wrote me out an authorization for Orlander’s address and telephone number from Personnel. I folded it lengthwise and put it in my breast pocket, sucked my cheek for a moment, then held up a hand and left his office. In the hallway outside Homicide I ran into Mary Ann Thaler. She glanced up above my hairline.

  “He must be getting better,” she said. “It doesn’t look as badly chewed as the others.”

  “What’s got him on end? He was getting along just fine after the burnout.”

  “The inspectors’ list is coming out today. He’s up.”

  “What are his chances?”

  “None and less. Last winter hurt him. It isn’t supposed to, but when you take unscheduled leave to work out a problem it goes into your jacket. Everyone knows it. And the shrinks wonder why there are so many borderline cases in harness. They’re afraid to climb out.”

  I leaned a shoulder against the wall. “I’d ask you to hang an eye out for him if it wasn’t all a cop can do to hang one out for himself.”

  “Thanks for not asking. It’s out anyway. I’d still be sorting out pink, yellow, and white forms if not for John.”

  “How’s your head?”

  “Case steel. But then it’s not my job to shovel dead children out of alleys. I don’t know how he stood it as long as he did.”

  “Wheaties.”

  She had a dimple. “What are you working on?”

  “A case the cops closed when you were in pinafores. You wouldn’t remember it.”

  “Never wore them. I was into treehouses and bib overalls. Try me.”

  “Ever hear the term ‘redstick ranger’?”

  “Not as often as I read it when I was in Records. The Arson Squad used it all the time.”

  I stopped leaning. “What’s it mean?”

  “Firemen’s slang. Redstick ranger, that’s the hot dog that scrambles up the ladder to save the pretty young widow’s cat just before the roof collapses. Cops call it the John Wayne Syndrome, but there isn’t an officer with Arson wouldn’t rather be wearing a raincoat and riding a truck. Where’d you come across it?”

  “Up north.”

  “Well, you heard it from an old hand. The new breed doesn’t use it. Flashy heroics went out with the red helmets.”

  “Lieutenant, what would you do if I kissed you right on the mouth?”

  She paused. Her eyes were robin’s-egg blue behind the glasses. “If you were very good at it, I might not cripple you until it was over.”

  I took her hand instead. Alone in the elevator on the way down I sniffed my palm. It smelled like pink soap.

  12

  THERE WAS NO ANSWER at Floyd Orlander’s number in Romulus. I hung up the pay telephone on the ground floor of 1300, got into the Renault parked in the blue zone, and sat there listening to my sweat break the surface while I thought about what to do next. A uniform driving a blue-and-white made that decision for me when he pulled alongside and gave me one of those cop looks. I started up and left the space.

  Marianne Motors kept its administrative offices on two floors of the National Bank Building, five sides and twenty-two stories of gray stone overlooking Cadillac Square. I used a city lot and rode an elevator trimmed in brass to the seventeenth. I hoped the ride would give me time to think of a question to ask Alfred Hendriks that he hadn’t answered that morning, but they don’t make elevators that slow.

  The doors shuttled open and I stepped out just in time to throw my arms around two hundred hurtling pounds.

  The man’s momentum would have carried me back into the car if the doors hadn’t closed. I slammed up against them, jarring loose my grip, and he went down on one knee, then sprang back up, pivoted away from me, and scooped a short-barreled .32 revolver out of a flap holster. I gave him the edge of my hand where his neck met his shoulder. The gun thumped the carpet.

  He whirled on me. I reached under my coat and he took two steps backward. His gun arm hung limp at his side. He had on a gray uniform and a cap with a shiny visor.

  Behind him, Richard DeVries had another man in uniform lying on his back in the reception area with a size fifteen shoe on his chest. A revolver like the one on the floor dangled upside-down by its trigger guard off the ex-convict’s index finger. The other man’s holster was empty.

  “Richie,” I said.

  It took him a second to respond. He didn’t look at the gun in my hand. He was wearing the suit I had first seen him in, wrinkled now after its soaking and a worse fit than it had been to begin with. The guard on the floor had a black bruise down the side of his face and the uniform of the one I had disarmed was hanging on by a button and one epaulet. DeVries’s tie was crooked.

  “I axed them to take me to see Hendriks. I got this for an answer.” He waggled the gun on the end of his finger. It looked like a charm off a bracelet.

  I moved into the room, holding out my free hand. I covered the guard standing by the elevator. “That’s a parole violation, Richie. I’ll take it.”

  He made a graceful little movement and the grip was in his hand with the barrel pointed at me. I stopped.

  “Nobody’s called me Richie since I went in.”

  “That’s what Davy’s father called you. I talked to the Jacksons today. He doesn’t hate you for what happened to Davy. The mother’s a different story.” Keep him talking.

  “She never did like me.”

  “Call the police.”

  This was the guard I’d hit. Out of the corner of my right eye I saw a stack of platinum hair and two eyes showing over the top of a doughnut-shaped reception desk to my right. She wasn’t going to move or call anyone. “Someone probably heard the noise and called them already,” I told DeVries. “If they find you with that gun you’ll go back to finish out your sentence. That’s if they don’t come off the elevator shooting.”

  “Man, I don’t like being muscled around. I had enough of that.”

  “Getting killed is worse.” I was watching his big finger on the trigger of the .32. I wondered if when it moved I would have time to empty the .38 into him before he shot me. It would take at least that.

  “The parole cop told me nobody was waiting to give me nothing on the outside. He didn’t say I couldn’t axe for nothing.” He dangled the gun again and held it out.

  While I was stepping forward, a man came through a door on the other side of the reception desk and took it. I covered him. Without taking his eyes off me he rotated the revolver one-handed, dumping the cartridges out onto the carpet, and laid it on the desk. Then he walked past me, picked up the gun the vertical guard had dropped, unloaded it the same way, and returned it to its owner, who was starting to get back the use of his hand and arm. The whole thing took less time than it takes to describe. I might have dreamed it.

  “I’m the security chief here. Please let him up.”

  DeVries glanced down at his foot on the horizontal guard’s chest, grunted, and removed it. The other guard came over and gave his partner a hand up.

  “They played partners on us, Mr. Piero,” the second guard said.

  “I saw the last part of it. Get out.”

  He gaped. “You mean, out?”

  “Out of the room. Although out of the building has occurred to me. You might want to move before I give it more thought.”

  “What about this guy?” The man from the floor spoke out of the good side of his face.

  Under the security chief’s scrutiny I remem
bered the gun and holstered it under my coat.

  “Take the stairs,” he said.

  When they had gone through the fire door, one helping the other, the chief turned to the blonde still hunkered behind the desk. “Take a break, Christine. I’ll watch the phones.”

  She stood, looked at DeVries and me, tugged down the hem of her charcoal jacket, and slid out of the doughnut. I pressed the button for the elevator.

  Mr. Piero waited for the doors to close on her. He was a small narrow party with white hair and a black pencil moustache. In a blue suit and black knitted tie on a white shirt he looked like a dashboard Cesar Romero.

  “No police,” he said. “Doesn’t do to have them come wailing up to the office with guns and bullhorns. It makes the investors nervous.”

  “That why you play it safe behind the door?” I asked.

  It rocked him like moonlight on flat water. “Who are you?”

  “Name’s DeVries,” the big man broke in. “Hendriks knows me. I seen him on TV this morning.”

  I said, “They got TV in the Alamo?”

  “I’m lucky I got a toilet. I seen it in a bar.”

  “Bars are hard on paroles.” I handed my ID folder to Piero. “I’m representing Mr. DeVries. Sometimes he forgets. I’d like a minute of Mr. Hendriks’ time if he didn’t bail out when the ceiling fell in.”

  “I didn’t start nothing.”

  “What’s your business with Mr. Hendriks?”

  “My client thinks he knows him. I want to ask him if that’s true.”

  Piero returned the folder. “References?”

  I gave him a couple of names and numbers. He used the telephone on the reception desk. While he was talking I asked DeVries what happened.

  “Woman gave me the stall. I lost it I guess. I ain’t used to dealing with them. She had a button under the desk.”

  “Next time they’ll come in with howitzers. You’d better let me drive.”

  The security chief cradled the receiver. “You check out. I suppose I owe you something for talking your client out of chewing up my men.”