Downriver

by Loren D. Estleman

  More desk stuff in the other drawers, all good quality but boring. I lifted things from the top and looked under them. Nothing, not even some respectable dust. Where the disk was that belonged in the last pocket bothered me. Then I realized what else was missing from the office, and then I remembered. I touched everything I’d touched a second time, this time with a handkerchief to remove prints, and left the room.

  The doors were still trying to close when I passed the elevator alcove. I didn’t know how to stop them short of moving the body, and anyway Hendriks didn’t seem to mind. Around the corner I found the door still open to the room containing the computer terminal. Inside I found something else, a blank paper sleeve with nothing in it on the desk next to the machine.

  HOLD was still flashing onscreen. I sat down and studied the keyboard. That didn’t tell me anything so I hoisted down the manual from atop the terminal and did some homework. After ten minutes I put it back and punched the key marked ACCESS. If what I’d read made sense and HOLD meant the file was still open, I was already past Security.

  The screen went blank and stayed that way for a second. I was starting to think I’d erased the disk in the machine when it began to print out. From left to right the bright green characters darted across in three neat vertical rows headed INVESTOR, AMT INVEST, and DATE, line after line, striping the screen faster than the human hand could type or the human eye could follow. When it finished, the screen was full, with the little green blip that had towed out the data flashing on and off at the end of the last line, awaiting further instructions.

  I didn’t have any for it even if I knew how to enter them. I was looking into a universe beyond my tight little orbit of thugs and grifters, bad-check artists and runaway daughters. There were too many abbreviations and acronyms in the left-hand row, too many digits in the middle. I had once held a thousand-dollar bill and another time I had peeked inside a briefcase containing several hundred thousand in neat bills bricked and banded. Millions were abstract numbers in a newspaper article with a Washington dateline. Glimmering there onscreen, all those zeroes presented black holes for a man to fall into and never find bottom. They were like dead men’s eyes. Hendriks’ had been the last to see them, just before he had toppled in.

  I shook off their spell and looked for the key that would eject the disk. I didn’t think the disk in my pocket would tell me much more than this one. Someone who spoke the language might. At length the machine kicked it out through a slot in the side and I put it in its sleeve and slid the slim package into my other side pocket. I flipped off the power switch and wiped my prints off the keyboard with my handkerchief. Then I got up and turned toward the doorway, where the guard DeVries had put on the floor yesterday was crouching with his gun pointed at my heart.

  22

  “WHAT HAPPENED to your face? He do that?”

  “No, the big black guy gave me that yesterday. I told you about it.”

  “Tell me again.”

  The guard sighed and told it. DeVries and I had jumped him and his partner from behind. They had a lively time of it, but they were getting the upper hand when Mr. Piero, their boss, came in and broke it up. They were for turning us in there and then but Mr. Piero said it was bad public relations. “Ask me, bad public relations is them two on the loose and Mr. Hendriks laying there cold as a carp,” he said.

  “Tell me again how you found him.”

  “I finished my rounds on the other floor and pushed for the elevator. It wasn’t working so I came up the stairs to check it out and that’s when I seen him laying there. I hear footsteps then. There’s no place to duck except the elevator and I’m in there when this guy walks past. My gun’s out but he just keeps walking. I figure he’s making his getaway, only he isn’t, because when I get back out in the hall I hear him in there working the computer. That’s where I got the drop on him. That’s his gun.”

  His listener, a chubby towhead I recognized from headquarters called Sergeant Toynbee, looked at my revolver on the doughnut-shaped reception desk. “You handle it?”

  “Well, I had to take it off him, didn’t I?”

  “Check it out.”

  His partner, who was standing closer, picked it up, swung out the cylinder, and held it up to the light to inspect the inside of the barrel. He was a black plainclothesman with delicate features and eyelashes as long as a woman’s.

  “Clean.” He flipped the cylinder back into place. “A little dust.”

  Toynbee nodded. He called the black officer Banks; Duane when he wasn’t introducing him. The sergeant went over and rested one large ham on the desk and looked at me smoking a Winston on the settee. The guard who had disarmed me and called the cops was sitting inside the doughnut. One side of his face was still bruised and swollen from the run-in with DeVries. Banks was just standing around slapping my gun against his thigh, and the two uniforms who had answered the radio call hovered over the man lying in the elevator, their thumbs hooked in their belts. Someone had found a way to keep the doors open. Hendriks was still dead.

  “What’d you do with the piece you used on him?” Toynbee asked me.

  “I ate it.”

  “It’ll turn up. If it doesn’t we’ll still make the case. We hardly ever get the time to tie up all the loose ends anyway.”

  “The case won’t be yours to make after Alderdyce gets here.”

  “Who says he’s coming?”

  “The guy on the floor. Corporate chiefs are too big for a sergeant’s lap. Also I’d be on my way downtown in cuffs by now if you weren’t expecting him.”

  He picked up the leather key folder I had taken off Hendriks’ body. The guard had put it on the desk next to the gun. “Yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s got the initials A.H. inside.”

  “It belonged to Adolf Hitler. I bought it in a Nazi supply store in Dearborn.”

  He picked up the ring containing the keys to the Renault and my house and office. “What about these?”

  “I’m a collector.”

  He looked at Banks. “You pat him down good?”

  “He wasn’t stealing office furniture, if that’s what you mean.”

  In fact he and the guard had both missed the flat computer disks in the saddle pockets of my coat. I dumped some ash on the carpet and rubbed it in with my toe. “What the hell, frisk me again. I’m a three-times-a-day man.”

  “What were you doing with the computer?” Toynbee asked.

  “Saving the world from space invaders.”

  “We got us a comic, Duane. Regular Chevy Chase.”

  “Makes you miss the guys that exercise their right to remain silent,” Banks said.

  Others arrived, including a kid photographer and a Vietnamese medical examiner who hummed while he worked. John Alderdyce came last, in a cocoa poplin suit and a brown tie with gold stripes on a tan shirt. He watched the M.E. fussing over Hendriks’ fingernails.

  “Shot?”

  “Once in the stomach and once in the thigh.” The Vietnamese sat back on his heels and stripped off his surgical gloves. “Thigh shot did it, from the amount of blood. Hit the femoral. Wouldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes after he went into deep shock.”

  “Time?”

  He shrugged. “Today. When I know what he had for breakfast and when, I’ll pin it down.”

  Alderdyce made the rounds of the uniforms and plainclothesmen, interviewing each separately in murmurs like a stage director. Finally he came to the guard at the reception desk. “Where’s your Mr. Fierro?” he asked.

  “Piero. Vermont. His vacation started today. Otherwise you’d be talking to him instead of me. If it wasn’t bad public relations.”

  “Describe the black man you had trouble with here yesterday.”

  He gave a fair description of DeVries, adding four or five inches to his height. It was a natural error. Alderdyce said, “Okay, thanks. Did the detectives get your address and phone number?”

  “Yeah.”

  �
�Go home then.”

  “I got four hours left on this shift.”

  “Spend them on the other floor. Nobody’s going to walk away with the place while we’re here.”

  The guard got up and headed for the stairs. Alderdyce spent a few more minutes with Toynbee and Banks, then sent them back to 1300 to write up their report. Toynbee hesitated. “What about this guy?”

  “He didn’t kill anyone today.”

  “He was heeled.”

  “So’s three-quarters of the local population. If you want to bust someone, get out a reader on Richard DeVries.” He spelled the last name. “Have Lansing wire his mug and prints and ask them who’s handling his parole. He’s fresh out of Marquette.”

  Toynbee wrote it down in his notebook and turned to go. “Oh, congratulations, Lieutenant.”

  “Thanks.”

  I got rid of my cigarette and looked up at Alderdyce. “Inspectors’ list come out?”

  “I’m on it. As soon as seven inspectors die or retire I get to move up a notch. Or if they add seven new precincts. What happened?”

  “I found him. Then the guard found me.”

  “How’d you know he’d be here?”

  “Marianne told me he was working.”

  His brow puckered. “Lieutenant Thaler?”

  “Not her, the other one. Timothy Marianne. I had lunch with him today, sort of.”

  “Busy weekend.”

  “About par. I found a corpse and almost got laid.”

  “When’s the last time you saw your client?”

  “This morning.”

  “What’s his beef with Hendriks?”

  “Not here.”

  He glanced around. The morgue team had arrived and a man in a plaid sportcoat and green tie was dusting the control panel for prints. “ There a room somewhere?”

  I nodded toward the leather key folder on the reception desk. “One of those probably fits Hendriks’ office door.”

  “Probably?”

  “The guard came before I could check it out.”

  “Uh-huh. Let’s do.” He picked up the folder.

  I stood and fell into step beside him. “What about my gun? Banks took it with him.”

  “You know how that works.”

  “Last time nobody cleaned it for six weeks.”

  “You still got that unregistered Luger?”

  “What unregistered Luger?”

  “Just keep it out of my sight. The commissioner’s watching me.” He found the right door and let us into the dead man’s office.

  “This is warrant country,” I said. “What’s the commissioner say about violating the Bill of Rights?”

  “The Constitution’s been suspended in Detroit, didn’t you hear? We got TV cameras on street corners and in public rest rooms. Traffic’s out conducting unlawful searches for drunk drivers.” He trailed his fingers over the desk’s glossy surface. “This guy did all right for himself. Too bad he croaked.”

  “To think it all started with two hundred grand in stolen bills.”

  He stuck his hands in his pants pockets and waited. Either consciously or unconsciously, he had maneuvered to have the desk between us.

  “DeVries saw a picture of Hendriks in stir,” I said. “He recognized him as the college kid who put him up to firing that building. Some of the serial numbers from the armored car job were on record, so Hendriks kept his profile down for a few years, first while the money was being laundered and then to avoid drawing attention to himself . He even took out a student loan from the U of M to tide him over. He went to work in the accounting department at Ford and eventually invested what he’d stolen in Marianne Motors.”

  “All this on a picture?”

  “Hendriks told me he was in England when the riots and the robbery took place. Except the records say he didn’t go there until the following fall. Meanwhile he was living where DeVries met him, in an apartment on Twelfth Street with a blonde named Frances Souwaine. She may have been an accomplice, or maybe not. The point is he lied.”

  “So he lied. So far I wouldn’t tie up a man to question him if he were alive.”

  “I think you would. You’ve got instincts same as me. But try this. According to his loan application at Michigan he was working part-time at a place called Merc-U-Print on Brady during the summer of 1967.”

  “Brady’s where they hit the car,” he said.

  “It was there to transport cash from businesses threatened by the riots to the bank. Someone working in one of the stores — especially a bookkeeper, which is what Hendriks was — would know the car would be there at that time. It gave him time to plan the robbery and set DeVries up for the fall.”

  “Why kill Jackson?”

  “Maybe they fell out. Maybe Hendriks wanted Jackson’s cut. The heist had gone down, they were running away, and his services were no longer needed. The other possibility is that with Jackson dead and identified at the scene, DeVries stood a better chance of taking the frame. He and Jackson were known to be friends. It would blow some of the heat off whoever else was involved.”

  “Too risky. Hendriks couldn’t know DeVries wouldn’t put it together and talk.”

  “Maybe. He’d seen how drunk and disoriented DeVries could get on at least one occasion. By getting him drunk again he might fog the details just enough. Or not. He needed the fire as a diversion and arsonists were escaping arrest all over the place. DeVries not being able to tell the cops anything might have been just a lucky fall.”

  Alderdyce started looking in drawers. I’d left the desk unlocked. “You’re overlooking the most likely scenario. DeVries was in on the plan from the start. I don’t buy him being as dumb as you say.”

  “Your way he was dumb enough to choose eighteen to thirty over the deal the cops offered him for talking. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “You can’t, but I can. You’d have to be black in the middle of a rebellion and be asked to trust a white police department.” He paused over the drawer containing the rack not quite full of computer disks. “You sure you weren’t in here?”

  “I won’t say it wasn’t on my list.”

  “What were you doing in the computer room?”

  “Frisking the place. The door was open.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Machine on or off when you got to it?”

  “Off.”

  “Funny, I felt it on my way in. It felt warm.”

  “You didn’t feel it.”

  He slid a thumb over the rack. Then he closed the drawer. “You’re right. I didn’t. Anyway I hope your client enjoyed his little vacation. He’s going back for life. Not that I blame him for killing Hendriks. If I did two dimes without pay I’d figure I had something coming.”

  “He didn’t kill him.”

  “Who did?”

  “Someone he trusted. You don’t sneak up on a person in that hall.”

  “DeVries could’ve been waiting when Hendriks stepped out of the elevator. Or he could’ve marched him there at gunpoint and drilled him as he was stepping inside.”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. It was one of the reasons I wasn’t on the force.

  23

  THE BANK BUILDING LOBBY was quiet, obsequiously so. I might have been in a cathedral on Martin Luther’s birthday. When I slotted a quarter into the telephone, the rattle echoed.

  “Yes.”

  How Raf got so much Arabic intonation into so short a word was a mystery. I said, “Walker, the Commodore included this number in some stuff he sent me today. Can you take him a message?”

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “I think he’ll want you to wake him up for this one.”

  The roast I hadn’t eaten at the Mariannes’ had come back to haunt me. Maybe it had to do with Alfred Hendriks being dead meat, but I had to have some. After Raf and I finished talking I bought a sack of burgers at a White Castle and ate them in the car. I didn’t feel like fit company for people.

/>   I turned on the radio, heard some music, and listened to the news. Hendriks wasn’t on it. By the next report he would be; Detroit is a reporters’ town. I turned it off and ate and thought. Mostly I ate.

  I went back with John Alderdyce further than anybody. In that time I had given up trying to trace the workings of his mind. There was no telling which way he’d have run with a piece of evidence like Edith Marianne’s nighttime ride with Hendriks. It suggested a couple of simple explanations. Cops like their murders simple, and the murderers usually oblige, theirs being the one crime almost always perpetrated by amateurs. But you dug your hole plenty deep when you expected Alderdyce to think like most cops. What went on in the Commodore’s century-old skull was one for the archaeologists. So I sat on the information. I felt like one of those birds that squat in strange nests and never know if they’re hatching another bird or a snake.

  That line of thinking was about as nourishing as the burgers. I hit the ignition, then had to sit back and wait for the battery to recharge itself before starting the Renault. Finally it turned over and caught and I took Woodward down to Jefferson.

  I didn’t stop at the Alamo. A gray four-door Chrysler without chrome was parked on that side of the street with two men in the front seat. They had their coats on and the windows up. The temperature was in the high eighties and they were sitting in the sun, but you can only turn down some two-way radios so low and they wouldn’t want the noise leaking out. It told me two things: DeVries wasn’t in, and we don’t pay our police near enough. Not being in a position to change either situation I doubled back into town, parked behind a truck unloading mammoth rolls of newsprint onto a dock on Lafayette, and went into the News building. There the female security guard called upstairs and told me Barry Stackpole was out playing racquetball at the Detroit Athletic Club.

  Before the glaziers and steelworkers won the architectural wars, Albert Kahn left his thumbprints all over downtown in the form of Italian Renaissance arcades and Greek pilasters. The DAC combines both in a seven-story candy box just off the Grand Circle on Madison. I used the defunct county star in my ID folder to bluff my way past the silver-haired gent at the front desk and went to the courts. A ball exploded off the wall next to my ear when I opened the door.