Downriver (12 page)

“I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

“Better you talk to me than I talk to the press. Old Man Stutch might get nervous and withdraw his investment.”

“The Commodore’s too busy concentrating on breathing to worry about money. The man is one hundred years old. But his grandsons are very, very conservative. You don’t strike me as the type who goes crying to the press.”

“I’m not. It was a bad bluff. But I’m fresh out of open doors, and I think you’re just as curious about this as I am.”

“You said something Al told you this morning made you suspicious. What was it?”

I uncrossed my legs and recrossed them the other way. “The man my client claims set him up was a student at Wayne State at the time of the stickup. Hendriks admitted he went to Wayne State, but he said he was studying in England on an exchange program during the race riots, which is when the thing took place.”

“I know he went to Cambridge.”

“Not then. I called Wayne State. Their records say he was carrying a full course load right here in Detroit that July.”

“A mistake.”

“Maybe. I want to hear him say it.”

After a space he took his foot off the desk and got his intercom working. “Denise, when Mr. Hendriks comes in, would you ask him in here? He is? Yes, now.” He hung up. “He’s in his office.”

The room got quiet. Then the man himself came in. He was wearing his dark hair shorter these clays and it had started to gray, but his even features and trim build and the Cupid’s-bow mouth could still stampede the distaff side of any singles bar in town. His dark suit and paisley necktie lay on him like cloth of gold. When he saw me sitting on the customer’s side of the desk his stride slowed, but he kept coming and stopped in the middle of the room. He had never seen me before.

“Al, this is Amos Walker,” Marianne said. “He wants to ask you a question. I’m sure you can satisfy him and then he can leave and we can go back to work.”

“Walker.” He pulled up the crease on his pants and sat in the chair facing mine. He had a dandy’s taste in shoes, alligator with gold ornaments on the straps. He recognized the name from that morning. When I told him what I’d told Marianne he crossed his legs.

“I admire your deviousness,” he said. “You could make it in the business world. Not far, but you might survive the office intrigue. Universities don’t open student files to anyone who asks. Certainly not in the time since we spoke.”

“I never even called them.”

“I didn’t think so. Anything else, Tim?”

“I guess not.”

Hendriks rose and looked down at me. “I ought to take you to court. You’d be bareass in the street by Thanksgiving.”

“Nice shoes,” I said. “Know where I can get a pair like them for thirty bucks?”

“Stupid. Your client’s got a stupid detective.”

He went out. Marianne propped his foot on the desk, stuck his hands in his pockets, and hoisted his eyebrows. “What was that about? You didn’t strike me as a crank.”

“I didn’t expect him to break down and confess. Maybe I hoped he’d cook up some kind of excuse, but not too hard. Mainly I wanted to see how he’d take it.”

“Pretty calm, I thought.”

“So did I. If he’d shown just a little indignation I might be closing the file on him right now.”

“You’ll continue?”

“I’m like a bad cold that way.”

“Are you always this sure of yourself?”

“I’m not sure now. If I were, this job would be a lot closer to finished. I’m being paid to find the ones who committed the robbery.”

“You could lose your shirt. Al doesn’t make empty threats. It’s one of the reasons I made him general manager.”

“The day I get a summons with his name on it and mine, I’ll know I’ve got the wrong man.”

“Explain.”

“It would force me to prove he’s guilty. Only an innocent man would risk it.”

“You’ve got a hell of a lot to learn about the law,” he said. “Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it changes color and scoots out from under you. Why do you think it took me eight years to get this far?”

“It’s far.”

“The higher I go the scareder I get. At first I was afraid I’d never have the money. Now that I have it I’m afraid someone will take it away. Never make a pretty woman your wife.”

I couldn’t tell if he was talking about the auto business or Mrs. Marianne. I got up. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

He nudged the model car with his toe. It rolled six inches and stopped at the edge of the desk. “My security chief isn’t working out. There might be an opening there soon.”

“I met him. Firing him would be a mistake. I wish you hadn’t said that. It puts you on the dark side of the list.”

“I can’t have you running around raising suspicions, even unfounded ones. This is a superstitious industry. One bad rumor and investors take to the hills.” He pushed the car back the other way. “Don’t make me destroy you, Walker. I’m just starting to like you.”

The guard downstairs had finished his sandwich and was reading a paperback with a naked woman and a scar-faced cowboy on the cover. He collected my tag and deposited it in the box without looking up.

“Mr. Hendriks asked me to put something in his car,” I said. “I forget what it looks like.”

He turned the page. “What am I, a car hop?”

I didn’t push it. Outside, the skyline was clawing at the sun. I took off my coat, loosened my tie, picked a direction, and started walking along the front of the huge building. It wouldn’t be parked where the general population left its cars.

My shirt was soaked through when I found the executive lot, two rows of diagonal spaces behind the building on the far end. It would have been closer if I’d gone the other way. But the exercise had loosened the muscles in my neck. Most of the cars, including the one parked in front of a sign with Marianne’s name on it, were Stilettos. The one in Hendriks’ space was a blue Porsche. It must have been a topic of some lively conversation upstairs.

I looked around. The lot had no guard. I inspected the underside of the canopy over the executives’ entrance and stepped away to scan the roof, but there was no surveillance camera either. Mr. Piero was wasted on the dummy offices in Detroit. I walked around behind the Porsche, unholstered the Smith & Wesson, and shielding the movement with my body, smashed the right taillight lens with the butt. I scooped up all the shards from the pavement, wrapped them in my handkerchief, and put them in my left side pocket. Then I walked back the short way to get my car.

There were some unoccupied spaces opposite the Porsche. I pulled into one that was starting to come into shadow and killed the engine. I cranked down the window on the passenger’s side for cross draft and sat back and wanted a cigarette but didn’t light one. The sun hung lower and lower in my rearview window and then dropped below the edge.

I
T WAS NEARLY DARK OUT
when Alfred Hendriks left the building, moving in that executive’s stride I had seen in Marianne’s office, unlocked the Porsche, and got in behind the wheel. The taillights sprang on, one of them white where the bulb was exposed, and the car shot backward out of the space and swung around and pounced forward, passing the Renault where I sat slumped below the headrest. I had to hustle to start the engine and get out behind him; I’d been expecting some noise when he started the Porsche. He was halfway to Jefferson by the time I rounded the building, but I needn’t have worried. That white taillight stuck out like a cauliflower ear.

The shift had changed half an hour earlier, but traffic was still heavy. I kept him in sight easily until Detroit, where it cleared a little and he picked up the pace. The Renault had to think about it before kicking in when I punched the accelerator. I almost lost him when he turned onto Woodward, but I spotted the taillight at the last second and cut somebody off taking the turn, getting a chirp of brakes and an angry horn in my right ear. I closed to within half a block of him on Woodward. There the lights were against him.

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.