Downriver (6 page)

“You been in too long. They’re listening now.”

It was the second time in twelve hours I’d been shoved outside. I elbowed my way back in. “What’s the phrase ‘redstick ranger’ mean to you?”

“Sounds like a slur. I been called most of the others but never that one. Where’d you hear it?”

“Around.”

“Yeah?” He waited, then shifted his attention to the polished toes of his boots. “Well, I guess you know it all now. No need for a big dumb blankethead to come around sticking his horns in.”

“We appreciate the help,” I said. “It just isn’t a local fight.”

The brim of his hat came up. His face was as calm as a Red Man label. “I live here, mister. This isn’t just a place to stretch my legs and pee like it is for you. Next time don’t take your fights into my county. I got all I can handle with the natives.”

“Y
OU BETTER HOPE
you never need Axhorn’s help,” DeVries said.

We were on I-75 heading south in a new rented Renault that was built about as well as the Maginot Line. Afternoon sun was spreading and the Mackinac Bridge hove in sight, looking at that distance more like cobwebs strung on a row of mop handles than the world’s fourth longest suspension bridge. The little motor chugged along on two cylinders most of the time, then squirted ahead on all four without warning before cutting back again with a little Gallic cough. We were saving gasoline but I missed the V-8 dinosaurs they used to sing about on beaches. There just aren’t any catchy rhymes for “transverse-mounted engine.”

I said, “You have to watch the human ones like Axhorn. Pretty soon you forget they’re cops and there you are in a broom closet down at the station telling everything to a tape machine. We didn’t have that kind of time.”

“Bullshit. You was worried about busting my parole.”

“It’s something to think about. Even if it’s not your fault it doesn’t look good for an ex-convict fresh out of the wash to be involved in high-speed chases and confronting known troublemakers in their homes. If they dug and found out you threatened the Wakelys with the girl you’d be back inside quick as spit. If I’d thought Corporal Hale hadn’t seen more of what happened on the highway I wouldn’t have told them as much as I did. I overcompensated there. One of the first things you’ll notice about me is I fall down as often as I get up.”

“You looked okay in front of Hank’s pistol.”

“So did you. We’ll make a couple of brave corpses someday.”

He tried sliding his seat farther back. He was practically sitting in the trunk as it was. “At least we know it’s Albert-Andrew behind it.”

“How, do we know that?”

“What Axhorn said about the job being professional. Guy palling around with Tim Marianne could hire all the muscle he needed.”

“I want to check out something else first.”

“What else is there to check?”

“What Davy Jackson’s relatives are up to these days.”

“Davy got hisself killed trying to take down that armored car. I didn’t have nothing to do with that, why’d they care about me?”

“The law thinks you had everything to do with it. Maybe he left behind someone who agrees.”

“His folks was shit-poor. They couldn’t afford the trip up here, never mind paying somebody to take it for them.”

“Twenty years is a long time to get rich in.”

“Not in my old neighborhood.”

Our tires whistled on the bridge. Last night’s fog had cleared and the water of the straits flashed metal-bright between the struts. On the center span we were skyscraper height above the surface, yet it looked close enough to dip a hand in. Here and there workers with coveralls on over their coats hung on the cables like spiders while they scraped and painted the sandy steel. They were there every day all year long except when it rained or snowed, painting and scraping and painting again, never finishing before it was time to start all over. They’d have made good detectives.

On the other side I paid the toll and we negotiated the broad crooked streets of Mackinaw City with fudge shops and billboards advertising tours on either side. Behind us an ore carrier as long as a football held was gliding under the bridge. The gulls were as thick as pigeons. While I followed the signs back to the expressway, DeVries filled me in on Davy Jackson’s family. It sounded like “Roots.”

We stopped to eat at a Wendy’s in Grayling, a fishing and deer-hunting town gone to K-Marts and Ben Franklin stores and chain restaurants, and finished the trip in a four-hour straight shot into Detroit. Our way took us through farm country, flat and green as a crap table, past Amish barns with Quakerly faces painted twenty feet wide on the ends, and past the new Zilwaukee Bridge, still unfinished after five years, rising like Roman ruins out of the low Thumb area, cracked and leaning with a monster crane marooned on top. Detroit had made haste in the middle of the scandal to hire the same engineer for its downtown People Mover project, still unfinished after three years. DeVries liked the farms best.

“I wasn’t looking at them much coming up in the bus,” he said. “I was busy hoping somebody’d broadside us and I’d be out a window.”

“Hard to believe all this will fall apart if a couple of plants close in Detroit.”

“That what they say there? Shit.”

“It’s worth a few million from the governor to say it.”

“They put me away for stealing a lousy two hundred thousand.”

“What was an armored car doing there in the middle of a riot anyway?” I asked.

“Every storeowner in the neighborhood was cleaning out their till. If you tried to do it yourself the National Guard shot you for looting. It was the modern American Revolution, man. Smash and grab and if you got shot you died for the cause and a color
TV
set.”

“The thing had to have been planned. They had to have known the car would be there at that time.”

“What my lawyer said in court. It didn’t do no good.”

“Who arrested you?”

“ ’Guards held me down for a big white dude in plainclothes. I don’t remember his name. Cops them days was all big and white.”

“They’re still big.” Dusk was folding down south of the last Flint exit. I turned on the headlamps. The car slowed down. “It’s a place to start. Closed cases have a special appeal for me. Nobody’s waiting to part my hair with a nightstick.”

“Why you want to go scratching around in that? I’m comin’ home, I done my time. All I want’s what’s mine.”

“Prison’s worse than I thought,” I said. “Piping pop rock into your cell can’t be constitutional.”

“Just find out who’s got the money. I’ll do what comes next.”

“We’ll discuss what comes next. Right now I’m most interested in finding out who wants to stop you before what comes first.”

“The cops, maybe. Maybe they think I got the money stashed and I’ll take them to it.”

“In that case they’d have just followed you and tried not to look like cops following an economy-size ex-convict. Stealing a car and laying a trap isn’t procedure. Besides, the insurance company would have paid that off long ago, and hiked its rates to cover the loss. It’s like the money never existed.”

“Makes it all the more mine.”

We drove the last forty-five minutes in silence. I tried the radio and got the same static I’d gotten north of the straits. At that time I’d blamed it on the microwave telephone towers they use up there, but it was just the French getting back at us for New Orleans. We swept under a riot of layered overpasses into Detroit, lit by forty-foot lamps on both sides of the expressway to discourage motorized rapists. It was a warm night that far south and music drifted out of a dozen rolled-down windows. I asked DeVries if he had a place to stay.

“Deputy warden gave me a voucher for a dump called the Alamo on East Jefferson.” He patted his shirt pockets, then remembered he was wearing different clothes. “If it didn’t get soaked to pieces.”

“It’s a dump all right. I’ve got a couch at my place.”

“Ain’t you afraid I’ll cut your throat for the silverware?”

“You haven’t seen the silverware.”

“I got used to my own company a long time ago. Thanks just the same.”

The Alamo made a good case for being forgotten. The name was etched in sputtering orange neon across a plate-glass window with the shade pulled halfway down like a junkie’s eyelid and the front door, a thick paneled oak job that had been refinished under Truman, stuck in its casing and required a shoulder to open. Inside, a green brass lamp with a crooked paper shade oozed light onto a waist-high counter with a floor register in front of it to catch coins. It was someone’s job to empty it out once a month and pay the electric bill. On the wall behind the counter, next to a life-size acrylic painting on black velvet of John Wayne dressed as Davy-Crockett, a sign was tacked reading:

THE ALAMO HOTEL

(Permanents and Transients)

No Pet’s

No Children

No Visitor’s in Rooms

No TV or Radio after 10:00 P.M.

Enjoy Your Stay

A squashed fly dotted the
i
in “Children.”

We were sharing the lobby with a square of trod rug and a wicker chair on a pedestal fashioned after an elephant’s foot. DeVries slapped the bell on the counter. It went click. After a minute, John Wayne swung away from us and a cadaver in a shawl collar and brown wing tips came in through a door squirreled behind the painting. He was a tall item of forty or sixty, but nowhere near as tall as DeVries, with black hair pasted down on a narrow skull and fuzzy white sidewalls and white stubble on his chin. When he stopped at the counter with the light coming up at him through the opening in the top of the lampshade he looked just like Vincent Price.

DeVries got out the wrinkled voucher he had separated from the clothes in his overnight bag and smoothed it out on the counter. “ They told me this is good for a week,” he said.

Vincent Price didn’t look down at it. “Ten bucks.”

“They said the room’s paid for. State takes care of it.”

“The ten bucks is for you. Leave the paper.”

The big man ran a hand over his beard.

“Welfare scam,” I said. “He rents the room to somebody else for the regular rate, then turns the voucher in to the state and gets paid a second time. It happens a lot during the winter when Lansing remembers the tramps and bag ladies on the street.”

“I don’t want ten bucks. I want a room.”

Vincent Price hit the bell, and this time it rang. John Wayne got out of the way of a young, very fat black man in king-size green slacks and a paint-stained gray sweatshirt gnawed off above the elbows, who came in from the back and walked around the end of the counter to stand next to DeVries. He was carrying a Louisville Slugger.

The counterman said, “Take the ten or don’t, but leave the paper.”

DeVries took the baseball bat away and broke it over his knee. He tossed the pieces onto the counter. The big end rolled off and landed on the floor with a clank.

“Registration card.” I waggled my fingers at Vincent Price, who took his jaw off the counter and slid one over. I selected a pen from a coffee cup full of them to hand to DeVries.

The fat man sent his right hook by Western Union. It started two inches above the rug and picked up speed as it rose, his body pivoting behind it with more grace than you’d have thought him capable of if you’d never seen a bouncer in action. DeVries watched it coming, then slapped it aside and stepped in and picked him up in both arms. He started squeezing.

Vincent Price reached under the counter. I pointed the Smith & Wesson at him. He relaxed and laid both hands on top, empty. I switched grips on the gun and clicked the pen.
“E-I?”
I asked.

“I-E. Big D and V.” The big man’s voice was strained. Not much, but a little. He was out of shape.

By the time I had the card filled out the fat man had lost consciousness, a large yarn doll dangling in the ex-convict’s embrace. I said, “You better let him go now. He doesn’t look black anymore.”

He spread his arms and the bouncer slid out of them. The counterman looked down at him disgustedly. “You killed him.”

Just then the man on the floor took a deep breath and started coughing like a cat. I said, “Nothing wrong with him that can’t be cured with ten or twenty yards of tape and no pole-vaulting for a month. Key.”

He slapped down a brass one with a green plastic tag. “Eighteen. Upstairs, end of the hall.”

DeVries picked it up. “You want to meet here tomorrow, or your office?”

“I had a partner once. It didn’t take.” I put the gun behind my hip. “You hired me, remember?”

“Who’s going to look after the shotguns and baseball bats?”

“I got this old without help.”

He rubbed his beard. I was coming to know the gesture. I said, “The parole board says you can’t get into trouble. It doesn’t say you can’t pay someone to get into it for you. I’ll be in touch.”

“Okay,” he said after a silence. “Don’t make me come looking for news. I stink at waiting. Marquette taught me that much.”

I went out after shaking his hand. He was getting better at it. The bundle on the floor made a lowing noise.

S
OMEBODY HAD MADE
a stab at breaking into my place while I was gone. During my routine inspection walk around the outside of the house I saw the gouges under the bedroom window where whoever it was had tried to force it with a pinch bar, but the paint was unbroken around the frame, so he must have given up. Maybe a blue-and-white had cruised down the street or — less likely — a neighbor had spotted him and sung out. It sure wasn’t due to any burglarproofing on my part. The decision to live without bars on my windows was a hard one, right up there with electing not to change my sex. Not that there was anything inside worth taking except a cheap stereo, a geriatric TV, two suits, and a shower. The Persian rugs were all out being deloused.

I washed off the Upper Peninsula in the shower, put on a robe, and called my service for messages. A junior partner at a legal firm I sometimes collect affidavits for had called asking me to get back to him, then called again later to cancel the request. A man had tried to reach me saying he was a vampire and wanted someone to act as go-between with the police before he handed himself over; I should return his call anytime after sundown. Two people had called asking for me and then hung up without leaving their names. That would be the last I’d hear from them. It was a comfort to know I had a service and hadn’t missed any of this.