Downriver

by Loren D. Estleman

  The rules of detection are pretty specific on what to do when the bird won’t flush. Following him until he does is long and boring and pays off about a third of the time, but up to a point it beats giving up. Just where that point is depends on the detective. Any way you play it you have hemorrhoids in your future.

  For forty-five minutes we toured the city and its northern suburbs — it was full dark now and the lamps were lit — and then we skinned off into the side streets of Birmingham, a place where the alleys shine and the muggers are well above average. Cars were scarce. I gave him several blocks. At the top of a hill on a street lined with trees and low brick walls, the taillight winked and his headlamp beams raked a concrete post at the end of a driveway. I glided past, turned off my lamps, and coasted to a stop against the curb two houses down.

  The moon was standing on edge. I got out with the flash from the glove compartment and walked back and checked the number on the concrete post, inserting my body between the light and the house. It occupied two levels, flat-roofed, horizontal, looking like a deck of cards with the top half cocked to the side. Low hedges bordered both levels at windowsill height.

  The front door opened, spilling light onto the driveway at the far end. I trotted back to the Renault and climbed in. Two doors slammed, then the Porsche backed down the driveway and into the street. Light from a gaslamp on the lawn splashed on a woman in the passenger’s seat and then the car slid out from under it, powering back the way it had come. I didn’t get a long enough look to see if I could recognize her. I U-turned and followed.

  He lost me at the second light. When he slowed for the yellow I did too, and then he hit the gas and shot across the intersection. I stopped on the red to avoid broadsiding a delivery van. By the time I got across, cheating by a couple of seconds, the white taillight had vanished.

  I drove around a couple of blocks, then headed back to Woodward and took it down to my office. I called Lee Horst, an information broker who never goes home. We haggled a while, then I gave him the address in Birmingham and asked him for a name. After a minute or so of computer time he came back on.

  “You need new clothes if you’re going to move in this company,” he said in his high soft voice. “Dressing the way you do you could be picked up for prowling in Timothy Marianne’s neighborhood.”

  I thanked him and said I’d send him a check in the morning. I sat there chewing my lip for a while, then closed the office and went home. I’m not Lee Horst.

  It was none of my business. Hendriks probably had a perfectly legitimate reason for driving off with the boss’s wife. You get thoughts in this work that make you ashamed of your calling.

  It had been a long day. I was too hungry to skip supper and too tired to talk to a waitress. I tracked down two minute steaks that were starting to curl in the refrigerator and grilled them for fifteen seconds on each side, apprehended some okra that had been hiding in a can in the cupboard, and released the works into my custody. Detecting is a hard habit to break, even at home. I interrogated a bottle of beer and turned on the TV to watch a pair of cops in unstructured jackets mow down some crooks and an innocent bystander or two with automatic weapons, in stereo yet; but not on my set. The telephone rang while I was changing channels.

  “Anything?” It was my client.

  “Where’d you get this number?” I asked.

  “They’s three more books than when I went in. I thought you was exaggerating about the telephone companies. I axed you did you get anything.”

  “I had a talk with the cop who arrested you. Also Hendriks, in person this time. Marianne was there too.”

  “So?”

  “So nothing. Hendriks still says he was in England. The difference now is I’m sure he’s lying.”

  “I knew that.”

  “You’re not conducting this investigation.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now I go to bed. You should too. You aren’t used to staying up this late.”

  He paused. “How come you never answer a question the first time I axe it?”

  “What?”

  “Hey, I thought you at least was friendly.”

  “Sorry. It hasn’t been one of my more productive days. I may have an angle on Hendriks. Maybe not, but it’s worth looking at. Meanwhile you might want to stay close to your room this weekend. I don’t want you spooking him. Besides, whoever made that try up north might be looking for you here.”

  “That don’t scare me.”

  “Your brains in your lap wouldn’t scare you. It’s your parole I’m worried about. The board doesn’t take to ex-cons with high profiles even if the attention isn’t their fault.”

  “What’s your problem? You been paid.”

  I said, “That wasn’t friendly at all.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Call a guy, okay? This waiting shit’s worse than slam.”

  “You try shooting baskets like I said?”

  “I started to, but I didn’t get that far. Listen, what you said about checking their teeth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It ain’t true.”

  I said I’d call. He said okay again and broke the connection.

  My neck was almost back to normal, but now my head ached. I washed down two aspirins with Scotch straight from the bottle and went to bed. Lying there I thought about prison.

  Time is the real punishment, not any of the several things that can happen to you inside. Sadistic guards aren’t the problem they are in movies. They exist, but given shift rotation and the high burnout factor, the hell they represent is short-term. Shower-room rapes aren’t any more common than the alley kind, and anyone who went to public school knows how to conduct himself during the bullying in the yard. The longer you’re in the less frightening the prospect of sharing another inmate’s bunk, all things being relative. The storied Hole is extinct. Modern administrators know it’s unnecessary. They’ve got isolation, and the old dark-cell with nothing but an unsanitary hole in a bare floor is no worse and maybe even a little better than being left alone in medium-gray light for an indefinite period with nothing to do, no books to read and nobody to talk to. Outside isolation, the routine doesn’t change: up at six, twenty minutes to shave, shower, dress, and eat breakfast, work till eleven, thirty minutes in the yard, work till four, twenty minutes for supper, an hour in the TV room if you haven’t killed an inmate or sassed a guard lately, lights out at nine. It keeps you from thinking, so that’s not punishment. The worst of it is day on day in an institution and time passing outside. Darkness is abolished. There is always light coming in from somewhere, and like a space traveler marooned on a planet with two suns you close your eyes and pretend you’re surrounded by night. Then you open them to that bland light and you know you’ll never make it. Or you’re afraid you will. It’s the one thing in life that’s worse than you picture. I didn’t even want to think about how it was when you were innocent.

  I wondered what was taking place between Alfred Hendriks and Timothy Marianne’s wife and if it had anything to do with anything.

  It seems I slept. At some point I stopped thinking about prison and was in it. I had on starched denims and shoes corrugated inside from the rubbing of many feet. Someone big and hairy laid an arm across my shoulders in the library — a library whose books carried no mention of crime or violence or sex, rows of North American Birds, anglers’ guides, and Laura Ingalls Wilder — and told me I was his girlfriend tonight. I ducked the arm and then was glad to find myself suddenly in my own bed in darkness. Only something was wrong with that, because my bedroom is never dark. There’s a streetlamp outside the window. Then I smelled cigar smoke.

  He was sitting in front of the window, the solid dark bulk of him standing out a little from the night. The orange eye of his cigar hovered around his thighs, then came up, etching a glowing trail, and brightened as he pulled at it, highlighting a city block of face and light hair and beard. Then it subsided. Gray smoke caught its light, turning in the still air.

  �
�You sleep hard.” He sounded cheerful.

  “You work quiet.” I sat up, not too quickly. “My wallet’s there on the bureau. You don’t want the watch. Not worth the trip to the pawnshop.”

  “I’m not a burglar.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t be. Okay if I turn on the light? When I get the hell beat out of me I like to see it.” I keep the Smith & Wesson on the lamp table at night.

  “I’m not muscle either.”

  “Listen, it’s okay, so long as you don’t find me attractive. I just went through that.”

  “Not hardly. You must lead an interesting life.”

  “More all the time.” I waited.

  “I knocked. No one answered, so I came in.”

  “The guy that sold me the lock said it was burglarproof.”

  “No such thing. I was a locksmith’s apprentice. There are just so many kinds and I’ve knocked them all down and put them back together. Combination’s the best, but who wants to live in a bank vault?” He puffed. His eyes were set back under a round brow. “Get dressed. We’re going somewhere.”

  “Casual, or shirt and shoes?”

  “Doesn’t matter. The Commodore isn’t picky.”

  17

  I TURNED ON THE LIGHT. To hell with permission. The gun wasn’t there.

  “Over here,” he said. “On the windowsill. You ought to keep it under your pillow.”

  “Not in this weather. They rust when you sweat on them.” I looked at him. He was a healthy thirtyish in a gray double-breasted with tight black leather gloves on his hands. His face was round and smooth and babyish but for the ginger-colored beard. His hair was lighter, curly, and starting to recede. He had Irish eyes. His boots were black vinyl with zippers inside the ankles and he wore his pants outside them. As far as I could tell he went a little under six feet and something over two hundred, some of it fat but not enough. I said, “I know someone who could take you.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. I’m not tough.” He forked the cigar between gleaming black fingers and ground it out in one of my ashtrays in his other hand. “I don’t mean to rush you, but the old man isn’t going to live forever.”

  “He already has. If we’re talking about Commodore Stutch.”

  “There’s another?”

  I got up and dug a pair of slacks and a sportshirt out of the bureau. I didn’t see myself getting back to sleep that night anyway. The alarm clock read eleven after two. “He’s awake at this hour?”

  “It’s his best one. He fades out around four, but he does more in those two hours than anyone you ever heard of does in eight. I watched him bail out a country once.”

  “Must’ve been something to see.” I tucked in the shirt.

  “Not really. Just the old man making a couple of calls, until you thought about what he was doing. It beat hell out of the limousine rental business.”

  “That what you did before?”

  “Yeah. His regular guy didn’t show up at the airport one time and I was there hustling fares. He hired me on the way to his place and used the cellular phone to fire his old guy. The limo was new, so he bought that too. That was, what, six years ago.”

  I tied my shoes. “You must like the work.”

  “The hours stink, but it pays great. He doesn’t get out much anymore. Mostly I run errands.”

  “Like putting the snatch on PI’s.”

  “It isn’t a snatch. I almost forgot.” He pulled an envelope out of his jacket and tossed it on the bed. The springs swayed. “For your time.”

  I picked it up and counted the new bills inside. “My time’s not worth this much.”

  “Call it a tip.”

  I held out one bill — Grant’s one of my favorite presidents — and flipped the rest into his lap. “Buy yourself some better cigars. I’ll talk to the man first.”

  “Six years,” he said, looking inside the flap. “Nobody’s ever handed back one of the old man’s envelopes without an audience to appreciate it.”

  “Maybe they were afraid you’d forget to tell him.”

  “Your house. I guess you can call anybody a crook you want to in it.” He stood and put away the package. “Ready?”

  “Do I get to ride up front?”

  “Sure. Be nice having someone to talk to for a change.”

  He loved to talk. I learned he’d given up locksmithing because his fingers were too big, driven a cab for a couple of years, then went to work for the limousine company and was saving up for a reconditioned stretch Lincoln of his own when the Commodore came along and offered him twice what he could have made freelancing. Now he was driving a gray Cadillac with cream leather seats and a fuzzbuster and CD player built into the dash. His taste ran toward Julie Andrews and the Original Ink Spots.

  “What was that about finding you attractive?” he asked. He didn’t miss a green light the whole way.

  “Just a dream I had. You ever do time?”

  “Uh-uh. You?”

  “Just the soft kind.”

  “I’d crack up,” he said. “I’ve got to move. It’s another reason I left the shop.”

  “What do they call you, Irish?”

  “Gerald. And I’m Swiss on both sides.”

  The Grosse Pointe house was on Lake Shore Drive, of course, with a view of St. Clair shining like polished shale under the same narrow moon I had seen in Birmingham earlier that night. He swung through the open gate, wound through a quarter-mile of lawn, and stopped in front of a round white portico attached to all the brick east of Wisconsin, where he unlocked my door from a button on his side of the car.

  “Go right in, they’re expecting you. The old man doesn’t like leaving the car outside in this damp air. He’s cheap about some things.”

  I had my choice of two doors, either of which would have let in Moby Dick on a platter. I chose the one on the right. The big front hall echoed when I drew the door shut behind me. A gold-bordered rug big enough to carpet all the walls, floors, and ceilings in my house looked puny in the center of a tesselated floor an acre across. Other than that the room was bare, lit gloomily by the fanlight over the door. I had been standing there the better part of a minute when a heavy dark-suited bald man separated himself from the shadows and came my way, being careful to walk around the rug. I wondered if that was a house rule.

  “Mr. Walker? I’m Hector Stutch, the Commodore’s grandson.” He took my hand in a doughy palm.

  I got it back as quickly as I could without offending him. “I’ve seen your picture, Mr. Stutch. You run Stutch Petrochemicals.”

  “I’m the president and board chairman, yes. Does our generation really run anything?”

  He had at least a generation on me, but I didn’t say anything. He arranged his face into a businesslike mode. It was as doughy as his hand. “I wonder if I might speak with you before you see Grandfather.”

  “The Commodore is ready for Mr. Walker.”

  I hadn’t seen or heard this one coming. He was my age, dark and Arabic-looking, in a white coat and pants and white shoes with rubber soles, which explained his silent approach. The outfit looked medical, but a tailor had been at it. He didn’t dump it into any community hamper at the end of the day.

  “Yes.” All the business went out of the soft face. It was like hoisting a white Hag. “This is Raf, Grandfather’s nurse.” He spelled the name. “He’ll take you to him. I’d be grateful if you’d see me before you leave.”

  “Aren’t you coming along?”

  “He hasn’t been invited,” said Raf.

  Hector glared. “I’m capable of telling Mr. Walker that.”

  “The study is this way.”

  I accompanied Raf down a passage illuminated by fluorescent tubes mounted over portraits best left dark. “What was all that?”

  “The Commodore seldom confides in his grandsons.”

  “That’s your privilege, huh?”

  “A man his age has no secrets from his nurse.” He rapped on a heavy maple door and opened it for me.
>
  The room was nearly as large as the entrance hall. The rug was identical and the walls, paneled in baroque carvings, towered into darkness above a dome of green light on a massive old desk at the rear. Behind it, tall drapes covered a Cinemascope window to within a foot of the center. Squarely between them sat a thin very old man. His ears turned out, what hair he had was very pale and very fine, and his skull was plain under the skin of his face. Only his head was visible in the eerie green light, resembling in its disembodied absolute stillness the pendulum of a stopped clock. He looked dead.

  The door clicked behind me and I realized I was alone with him. I started forward.

  “Stay there,” he snapped. “I need a magnifying lens to read a newspaper, but I can count the strokes of a hummingbird at a hundred yards.”

  I stopped. “That must be a hot betting item at picnics.”

  “Levity in the young is unseemly. Repellent in the old.”

  “I fall somewhere in the middle.”

  “Shut up and learn.”

  His voice was thin but far from weak. It had a New England crack in it you don’t hear much anymore, even in New England. I shut up.

  “Your name is Amos Walker, no middle initial,” he said. “You’re thirty-six years old. You fought in Vietnam and Cambodia, not without distinction, re-upped and transferred to the military police after you shipped home, left there after three years, and received your private investigator’s license while employed with Dale A. Leopold, deceased, at Apollo Investigations. You’re divorced — irreconcilable differences — live alone, drink rather too much but you’re not an alcoholic, and smoke Winstons. The application you filed for a MasterCard last month has been turned down. Right so far?”

  “I don’t know about the application. I’m still waiting for word.”

  “Trust me. You were dropped from the Detroit Police Academy just before graduation for assault and battery of a fellow cadet, a congressman’s son. Reason given was he made a homosexual advance on you in the shower. What was it really?”

  “I didn’t like his towel.”