Downriver
Loren D. Estleman
To Ray Puechner:
You told me the best was coming.
I had it all along.
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
S
UPERIOR ROLLED UNDER
a Wedgwood sky, stacking sunlight in long platinum rows and tangling in the broken rocks on the beach. Early in the afternoon a shoreward wind blew passing compact cars across the centerline and teased a pale floating piece of old decking toward land. The plank was worn smooth and poreless and round at the edges like soap. It might have been wandering the lake for a hundred years, the lone survivor of a stove ship carrying coal oil and barrels of molasses and a bonneted lady’s Sunday surrey, rotting below Six Fathom Shoal along with skeletons swaddled in black oilskin. It might have been just a piece of old wood.
At that time of day moisture glistened in flat sheets on the gun towers and formed moving columns of droplets like soldier ants on the chainlink fence and on the snaggled teeth of the concertina wire coiling on top of it. The air was wet and clean and smelled of bleached driftwood and sun, scabbed iron and arcing fish. Serving time in Marquette Branch Prison, on the shore of the largest freshwater lake in the world, must be like dying on the first nice day of spring, day after day.
I rested my forearms on the Chevy’s roof, watching the gate and letting the sun warm my back and draw the sting from between my shoulders. It was an overnight drive north from Detroit across the straits and through the Upper Peninsula, and I’d made it in twelve hours. From Clare on up it was all pines and pasty stands and straight blacktop like a gash in a green carpet with dotted line flashing under the car, scorching your eyeballs and whiting out your humanity. Now the volume on the radio was up and so was the Tigers’ new second baseman, stalling at the plate while he adjusted his gloves and wristbands and helmet and footguard. Twenty years ago Al Kaline used to hit them barehanded over the right field wall into the middle of Michigan Avenue wearing just his uniform and jockstrap, but then he didn’t know any better. This one did, and grounded out on the first pitch to end the inning.
The Orioles had men on first and third with two out at the top of the sixth when my client appeared. He was a head taller than the guard escorting him and solid, the way men who have been lean all their lives get to be when they take on weight, wearing a gray suit that fell short of his wrists and ankles and a white shirt with a spread collar. It had to spread to make room for his neck. The whites of his eyes glittered in a charcoal face and the skin of his shaved scalp was tight and black and gleaming. I didn’t think much of that. It reminded me of blacktop.
When the gate was open he stepped through, then the guard said something and he turned his body and looked down at him. Ivory teeth slashed the big man’s face and he said something back. The gate clanged shut, hard enough to crackle the radio. Outside the fence he set down his cheap overnight bag and stretched, arching his back and straining the suit, reaching up with arms as long as some men are tall; holding that position for almost a minute, like a cat that had been cooped up in the house too long. Finally he unwound himself and spent some time tugging at his sleeves. He licked his lips and smacked them, then he did it all over again. Tasting the air. When he was through with that his big shiny head pivoted around like a gun turret and he looked directly at me. I put up a hand. He scooped up the bag without seeming to bend and came over. As I stepped forward to meet him, the Oriole at the plate broke his bat on a ninety-seven-mile-an-hour fastball and scored two runs.
“You’re Walker?” It was a shallow voice, considering how far it had to come to clear his mouth.
“Welcome to freedom, Mr. DeVries.”
After an instant’s hesitation he wrapped a hand twice around the one I’d extended and turned it right and left, examining it.
“Hope I’m doing it right,” he said. “I ain’t shook hands since Johnson.”
I said he was doing just fine and reclaimed the bonemeal that had been my fingers. Up close his face was fissured with fine lines like old china and he had a close-cropped beard resembling a shotgun pattern. From a little distance he might have been thirty or fifty, but I had done my homework; he had been twenty-two the last time that gate had closed behind him, twenty years before.
“That must have been some conversation you had with that guard.”
“Heiny?” The smile cut across his features like yellow jade. “He said he’d hold my room for me till I got back. I told him I was just going out to look up his daughter.”
“You better hope you don’t come back.”
“No chance. I been looking at that goddamn lake every day since they kicked me up here from Jackson. Come November when them waves come walloping them rocks yon can hear your name in them. First thing I’m fixing to do after I get me some real threads is buy an oar and then I’m going to put it on my shoulder and start walking inland till somebody axe me what’s that thing I got there on my shoulder. Then I’ll build a house right on that spot.”
“I see they’ve got Homer in the prison library.”
“Oh, we’s all readers. That’s what they turn out in Marquette, readers and dope addicts. You bring it?”
I reached in through the open window, plucked the paper sack off the front seat, and held it out. “It’s cold by now.”
“Sons of bitches took twenty minutes on top of what they had coming to them processing me out.” Setting down his overnight bag, he took the square Styrofoam container out of the sack, found the tab, and freed the fat hamburger from inside. “I been wondering about this here fast food,” he said, handing back the litter. “When I went in it was short order or wait.”
I watched him make easy work of the sandwich. The advertising said it took two hands, but his weren’t the hands they had in mind. When it was gone and he was using a fistful of paper napkins to wipe special sauce off his beard and fingers, I asked him how he liked it.
“Well, it’s fast.” He gave me the same look he’d given me from the gate. This close he was staring almost straight down. “Elon Royal said you was a big man.”
“Elon Royal never played center for the Pistons.”
“I didn’t neither. They was scouting me when I went down.”
“How is Elon? I haven’t seen him since before he tried crashing out of Jackson.”
“Isolation. They found a extra toothbrush poked under his mattress last week.”
“I heard they make you be good up here.”
He wasn’t listening to me. He had his head cocked toward the radio. It was the bottom of the sixth and Detroit had a man on. “Norm Cash was fouling them off the day they wrote me up. Sucker on the mound must of made a dozen pitches. This big sergeant had a Japanese radio.”
“Cash is dead.”
“I heard. You know what they took me down for.”
“Armored car robbery. During the riots.”
“Conspiracy to commit,” he corrected. “They said I bombed a building to turn heads while my partners hit the car. A man got killed and they threw the City-County Building at me on account of I was the only one they caught alive. Eighteen to thirty for starting a fire in a condemned building.”
“You didn’t do it?”
“Oh, I threw the bomb. Bomb. Fucking Thunderbird bottle full of paint thinner with a burning rag stuck in the top. The place was three years past due to come down. Rapists was using it, dope dealers. My favorite cousin OD’d. Anyway they put the fire out in ten minutes and me in for twenty years. I didn’t even know the armored car was there.”
“But you knew one of the robbers. The one they killed.”
“Davy Jackson. Little Davy. Shit, I went to school with him, when I went. He got himself shot down and they give me a piece of that too. That’s the law; someone you stick up a place with gets killed, you’re on the hook for murder. Only I never stuck up a place in my life.”
“After you called I read up on the case,” I said. “It was a hot time. Forty-three people were killed in a week and a lot of real estate got turned into ashes. They were afraid it might start up again and so they were more lenient with most of the people they arrested than they might have been otherwise. Not with you, though. They set yours aside as a special case, a punk trying to turn a major tragedy to his personal advantage. Even so they offered you an easier time of it if you agreed to name your accomplices and tell them where the money was.”
“If I had accomplices I would of told them. If I had money I’d of bought a real lawyer instead of the kid P.D. they hung on me. Why’d I want to knock down no armored car? I had a shot at pro ball and I was going to be married. Well, they took care of both of them things; my girl hooked up with somebody else and I broke the free-throw record in slam sixteen years ago. My life’s shit. Okay, I did arson, but I had a clean record before that and any other time, any other summer, I’d of got probation. What I got was half my life in a room on the lake.”
He’d laid it all flat, his voice rising only once, when he spoke of his chance to play for the Pistons and the girl he’d planned to marry. But his eyes were glistening. I reached in and turned off the radio.
“If it’s clearing your name you want, you need a lawyer, not a detective. I could have told you that over the telephone if you’d let me and saved you my expenses here and back.”
“Forget my name. Everyone else has. I want the money.”
“What money?”
“The two hundred thousand dollars they stole out of that armored car. I paid for it and now it’s mine. I want you to find the ones that done it and get it from them and bring it to me.”
“I
’M A LOUSY THIEF,”
I said, when it sank in. “I return quarters I find in telephone coin slots. It makes me crazy but there you are.”
“You don’t think I got it coming?”
“More, probably, if you’re innocent. It works out to ten thousand a year. These days that’s barely a living wage. Say you’re telling the truth. Finding them is one thing, getting the money is another. If it isn’t all spent they’ll be attached to it by now.”
“We’ll work that part out after you find them.”