Downriver (20 page)

He swiveled his eyes floorward modestly. “I have a system. It’s a kind of skeleton key and I’m not prepared to share it.”

“Five hundred million,” I said.

“Give or take ten million. Those are projections based on the trends indicated.”

Barry said, “I’m small time. Guys I write about whack each other for thousands.”

“He wasn’t above dealing in thousands,” said the short round man. “And he wasn’t above dealing with the people you write about.”

We waited, watching him. He glowed. I had him tagged then. People who turn state’s evidence usually do it for basic reasons. Getting center spot is one of the top five.

“CerbCorp,” he said. “Maybe you recognize the name.”

I said, “It was one of the investors listed. I never heard of it.”

“I have.” Barry drank and made a face that said his coffee had grown cold. “The Cerberus Corporation is parent company for the Miskoupolis brothers’ restaurant chain.”

“I thought they were all dead,” I said. “Or in jail.”

“Nicholas died a long time ago. Aristotle last year. Sherman’s alive and free pending appeal on a conviction for suborning to commit perjury. I interviewed a witness to the deal.”

“Sherman?”

Barry grinned. “The old lady had to get in one shot. Anyway Sherm has no plans to die this century, if what he spends on cosmetics and desiccated monkey balls means anything.”

“How much did CerbCorp have tied up?” I asked the short round man.

“Six hundred fifty thousand.”

I looked at Barry. “Would he kill over that?”

“He’s killed over a hell of a lot less.”

A
LFRED
H
ENDRIKS MADE
the lead in the Sunday
Free Press.
I didn’t and neither did Richard DeVries, although Alderdyce told the reporter he had a suspect. Timothy Marianne was unavailable for comment, but a Ford vice president had complimentary things to say about the former accountant based on ten minutes with his personnel file, and Hector Stutch submitted a prepared statement to the effect that the tragedy would have no influence on Stutch Petrochemicals’ deal with Marianne Motors. I wondered if the Commodore had dictated it or written it out in his frail but unwavering hand. In any case, whatever resemblance it bore to any telephone calls he had made between two and four that morning would be slight. I turned to
Doonesbury
for the lowdown, but the strip’s concern that day was the President.

I had left Barry’s place shortly before eleven-thirty and been in bed by midnight. The morning news on television had few details to add. Neither account looked or sounded like what I’d seen or heard in the National Bank Building. There never is much resemblance.

I made a local call. After breakfast and ablutions I put on slacks and a knitted shirt and a cotton jacket. Cooler temperatures were predicted. Outside I took off the jacket and flung it into the back seat; the weather was as hot as it had been right along.

The Argo chain, encompassing some forty restaurants throughout the Midwest, offered Greek fare in homogenized fashion to middle-income diners who would probably never see Athens. Appropriately, the anchor of the chain was in Trappers’ Alley, a vertical conglomeration of boutiques, eateries, and craft shops under one roof in Detroit’s historic Greektown, which is to Hellenic culture what Disney World is to the military-industrial complex. It’s nearly as easy to get lost in as the Renaissance Center, and Lord help the diners and browsers the day someone yells fire.

The busboys were setting up for lunch when I entered and told a large, dark-eyed waitress in ceremonial dress that I was meeting Sherman Miskoupolis. She nodded once and plowed a path through gold coats to a high booth at the rear, where a small man in a sharp suit rose and clamped my hand in a grip that had had some practice.

“Good morning!” He had one of those booming Mediterranean voices that usually go to small men. “What will you eat? You’re my guest.”

“Thanks, I had breakfast.”

“What, toast and coffee? Daphne, baklava and espresso for Mr. Walker. I’ll have the usual.”

The waitress turned. I touched her arm. I went on looking at the boss. “Nobody’s going to yell
opah
and set anything on fire, are they?”

“Many of our customers expect it. But in your case we’ll resist the pyrotechnics.”

I let Daphne go and we sat down. He had a thick brown mug of what was presumably espresso in front of him. Sherman Miskoupolis dressed young for his age, in a severely tapered jacket with flared lapels and bright orange tie with green fleurs-de-lis. But then he was a young-looking sixty-two. His face was small and boyishly smooth and his chestnut hair, teased into classical curls, grew too far down on his forehead for a man at his time of life. It was a good lift but the transplant surgeon had gotten carried away. The dye job was expert.

“You said something over the phone about this Hendriks tragedy,” he said. “Terrible thing.”

“Murder’s a crime, not a tragedy. The press gets them mixed up often.” I sat back while the waitress set a mug and a saucer containing a sticky-looking sweet in front of me. She left, saying she’d be back with Miskoupolis’ order. “Hendriks’ records show the Cerberus Corporation had a substantial investment in Marianne Motors. I’d like to talk to you about it.”

“Hadn’t you better talk to my broker? Managing the chain takes most of my time. He tells me what looks good and I send him a check.”

“Is he connected?”

I got the stone face. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m tired of being coy, Mr. Miskoupolis. The person I represent will be charged with Hendriks’ murder if the police don’t shoot him first. I’ve been dunked in the lake and threatened with guns and lawsuits and almost seduced. I ran out of this month’s allotment of tact sometime yesterday.”

“I can respect that. One of my earliest memories is of my oldest brother Nicholas eating breakfast in our father’s home in Mistra with a shotgun leaning against the table. We were fishermen. One of our neighbors claimed someone had cut his nets.”

“Nicholas?”

“What did it matter? In those days when you had a grievance against a man you took on his whole family. Nothing changed when we came here. After the Italians dumped Nicholas behind the Grecian Gardens, women in black lit candles for their dead husbands all over the east side for a month.”

The atmosphere in the booth had changed. We sat in silence while Daphne put a plate in front of Miskoupolis and freshened our espressos from a glass carafe, then withdrew. Miskoupolis’ meal looked like thistle pods floating in skim milk. Whatever it was it didn’t look good enough to be anything less than healthy.

I said, “Hendriks kept a set of books nobody else knew about. According to them he sold the same shares in Marianne almost three times over. Which makes CerbCorp’s six-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar investment essentially worthless. Does that come as a surprise?”

“If I said it doesn’t, I killed him. Is that how you see it?”

“Not at all. You’d have someone do it for you. No one in your family has carried a gun since you muscled into the restaurant business.”

He lifted his spoon and shipped some skim milk. “If either Nicholas or Aristotle were alive and you suggested that, you wouldn’t be.”

“Ouzo under the bridge. You didn’t answer my question.”

“I began to suspect it. In the restaurant business you develop an eye for the patron who is planning to climb out the bathroom window and beat the check. My lawyer was preparing to call for an audit when this thing happened.”

“I’d be disappointed if he wasn’t. That’s what I’d have mine do if I were rigging a murder I didn’t want to do time for.”

“Your information is out of date. I merely represent a corporation. The stockholders share the loss. Even if I wanted revenge — which would be counterproductive financially, as it wouldn’t recover what was lost — it would have to be for a great deal more than my minority share of an amount that wasn’t much to begin with.”

“Every second hood I meet these days says he’s into legitimate profit and loss,” I said. “I have trouble buying it.”

“I’m not selling it. Only drastic circumstances call for drastic action. As long as the person who did the fleecing remains alive there’s a chance he’ll repay. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be good business to make an example of him afterwards. But only afterwards. Murder as an option is useless once it’s exercised.”

“Are you always this candid, Mr. Miskoupolis?”

“You strike me as a man who appreciates candor. Of course, I’m only speaking hypothetically.”

“Of course. What decided you to invest in Marianne?”

“It was a board decision. We thought there was a market for a sports car in that class. Now that the energy sham has ended, the country wants to get back out on the highway and laugh at the limit. It was worth a gamble. The money wasn’t that big, as I said.”

“Did you approach Hendriks or did he approach you?”

“I can’t recall. What difference does it make?”

It was the first time he’d shown impatience. I felt a tingling. Maybe it was the espresso.

“It was your decision, wasn’t it?” I said. “Not the board’s.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you know Hendriks from before?”

“I didn’t.” He spooned a thistle pod into his mouth and chewed it silently.

“One of your brothers, then. Or one of their people. Say twenty years ago, before the restaurant business. When laundering stolen money was a family staple.”

He went on eating.

Bingo.

T
HE LUNCH CROWD
had started to wander in. A speaker mounted over the kitchen door crackled, whooshed, and released one of those Aegean tunes that sound like violinists tuning up on a hot griddle. Sherman Miskoupolis finished his meal and set aside his plate. I hadn’t touched my baklava.

“I spent some time last night with someone who knows enough about you to write your family biography,” I said. “You were a long time finding your specialty. A little gambling, a lot of loansharking, some drugs, even a legitimate fishing and charter service back home in Greece. Generally speaking, when a family operation like yours has foreign interests, sooner or later they’re used to lay off goods and cash too hot to handle in the States. Who put Hendriks on to you twenty years ago?”

“Suppose you tell me.”

“Doesn’t matter. He had a live-in hippie girlfriend who probably had drug connections. One affiliate talks to another and pretty soon young Hendriks is here in Greektown eating moussaka with Nicholas or Aristotle or their kid brother Sherman. Maybe he talked to you before the robbery, but you wouldn’t have struck the deal until afterwards when he’d proved himself. He was just a squirt after all. But he delivered, and the money went to Greece and got converted into — what is it over there, sesterces?”

“Drachmas.”

“—drachmas, and then returned and reconverted into dollars, with everyone taking his cut down the line. The amount left would still be substantial, but hardly enough to keep an ambitious young bandit in tropical splendor for the rest of his life. The process had already taken so long he had to take out a student loan to live on.

“So he banks the squeaky new money and goes to work for Ford for nine or ten years — maybe knickknacking the accounts to feed his larcenous soul, or maybe he’d learned patience — until Timothy Marianne comes along with an investment prospect he can’t refuse. Bang, he’s in on the ground floor of Marianne Motors, and bang again, a few years later he gets made general manager. It’s a desperado’s dream.”

The waitress came and refilled my cup. Miskoupolis put a hand over his and said nothing. She left.

“I think you approached him,” I said. “Maybe even CerbCorp’s shares in Marianne stock were a gift to keep you from tipping the authorities to that old armored car job. The statute ran out a long time ago on the robbery, but Davy Jackson’s death makes it murder and that just stays there like atomic waste. This is a longshot, but maybe your demand for a cut is what started him laying off shares already owned by someone else. Maybe not. Try this: After dealing you in at gunpoint, Hendriks gets to thinking about it and realizes there’s no way you can make good on your blackmail threat without implicating yourself as an accessory after the fact. So he deals you right back out. Maybe that’s what he was doing yesterday with his computerized ledger when your mechanic marched him to that elevator and fed him two slugs.”

Fie laughed then, one of those roaring Greek-fisherman laughs that stopped every other conversation in the room. It didn’t have the hollow note I would have liked. It sounded relieved.

“Do you think I’d send a man in to kill him and not retrieve the records of our transaction?” he said, when he stopped laughing. “How long did you spend on this theory?”

“Just the time it took to serve it up. It only came to me five minutes ago.”

“I’m glad for you. It means you didn’t waste any more of your time than you have of mine. Now unless you intend to eat that, others are waiting for this booth.”

I pushed away the saucer. “It didn’t look like any contract job I ever saw. There were three holes in the back of the elevator and only two in the victim. Whoever fired the shots missed at least once, more unless both slugs went through Hendriks. I had to see what you did with it.”

“Sorry you made the trip.”

“I’m not. I can see I was right about his laundering the stolen money through you. You’re not the poker player you think you are. Too warm-blooded.”

He let that pass. “Look for your killer among the other investors. Start with the one that stood to lose the most.”

“That’ll be Stutch. That still leaves the problem of the extra holes. The firm would hire better talent.”

“Unless someone wanted to make it look like an amateur job,” Miskoupolis said. “I suppose that puts me back in the running.”

“I can’t see you being that cute.” I drained my cup. “I don’t guess you’d consider telling the police about that twenty-year-old deal. It would corroborate my client’s story. They couldn’t charge you except for the murder, and that’s so many times removed a man with your lawyers could beat it over the telephone.”