Downriver (8 page)

For all that, the Jacksons’ house showed efforts to slowdown the skid. The crabgrass was cut, the old boards repainted recently, and some streetwise flowers grew in boxes under the windows looking like tough kids in bright knit caps. Somebody had painted the house number on the curb, but somebody else had sprayed it over with a word that belonged there. I followed a row of sunken flagstones to the stoop and rapped on the screen door.

I could make out some furniture inside, but the room wasn’t lighted and the double-ply screen was set a little off, obscuring details. I didn’t figure that was an accident. Floorboards shifted and then a short thick black man came to the screen holding something that looked like a gun.

“Mr. Jackson? I’m Amos Walker, the man who called.” I opened my ID folder and flattened it out against the screen.

He reached up and flipped an invisible hook out of an unseen eye. “Come ahead in.”

I opened the door against the pull of an ailing spring and caught it behind me before it slammed. He had stepped back to give me room. He had on a white shirt with an open collar stuffed into colorless slacks and his feet were shod in imitation moccasins with simulated leather stitching. The thing that had looked like a gun was a bar of tarnished lead like they used in Linotype machines, about ten inches long. He saw me looking at it and balanced it on his palm.

“I was a dog-damn good printer before they offsetted me clean out of the business. I got enough of this in the attic to sink the Boblo boat.”

“Where’s the gun?”

“Hell, the wife won’t have one in the house since Davy. Them the ones?”

I held out the crutches. He stuck the lead bar in his hip pocket and took them, fitting them under his own arms. He had a wide mouth and deep creases in his forehead and eyes like shotgun pellets lodged in cracks. And gray hair and a thick neck. So had a lot of older black men, including the one who had helped drive DeVries and me into the lake, if Hank Wakely told the truth.

“A mite tall for Emmaline,” said the old man, testing his weight on the aluminum. “She knee-high to a pig knuckle.”

“They’re adjustable. Just loosen the screws there and there and slide up the bottoms.”

He leaned the crutches in a corner. “Take a load off, son. Can I get you something cold? They’s all kinds of pop and juice in the icebox. No beer, though. The wife don’t hold with spirits. Won’t have them in the house.”

We were in a living room paneled in woodgrain vinyl with a nylon rug and three chairs and a sofa covered in knobby synthetic. Nothing expensive, but nothing old and worn out either, and all of it very clean. The one quality item was an antique sideboard older than the house, with family pictures on it in brass and silver frames. Several of them featured a more slender, much younger version of Cleveland J. Jackson, wearing a style of clothing not yet designed when he was a youth. The wide mouth was built for smiling. “Davy?” I asked.

“That boy liked having his pitcher took. I did too, his age. You know you got old when you start walking away from cameras. How about that cold one?”

“Thanks, I’m fine. How does Mrs. Jackson stand on tobacco?”

“Won’t have it in the house. But she upstairs snoozing.” He picked up a candy dish from the end table between the chairs, tipped the peppermints out into another dish containing caramels in plastic wrappers, and set the empty dish down next to my elbow. I lit up and placed the match in the dish. It was close in the room and most of the peppermints were fused together in a bright lump. I asked if Mrs. Jackson had had an accident.

“Slipped in some water at the post office last February and busted her hip.” He took a seat in the chair nearest mine, grunted, took the lead bar out of his hip pocket, and laid it on the table. “She gets around with a walker but I don’t want her getting used to it. You gots to keep moving, son. That’s the secret.”

“Any lawyers knock on your door?”

“Like woodpeckers in heat. I should sue the government, let my dead sister’s junkie kid Delmer collect when we’re in the ground? Anyway, the wife don’t like to cause no fuss. You say Richie’s out?”

“They sprang him day before yesterday.”

“What’s it been, ten-twelve years?”

“Twenty. They paroled him.”

“Dog-damn. Don’t seem twenty. Bet it does to him, though. How’s he look?”

“Does it matter?”

“Sure. Him and Davy was some tight. I always thought that boy was headed for a fall, though. He was just too angry. You don’t know what it was like to be black and angry in ’sixty-seven. They was restaurants around here wouldn’t serve us. Someone busted in your house with a gun, you called the cops, they might come out before the end of the shift if it wasn’t too far and their feet didn’t hurt. White folks half your age calling you boy, and them was the friendly ones. It was like that if you lived invisible and didn’t talk back. Otherwise they come down on you like a bucket of shit. Davy he went bad, I knew he’d get hisself chewed up; when they called and said he was dead it was like he been that way a long time. But I was scared for Richie. He had a chance to pull hisself out. I see him slapping that ball all over the community court and bringing that hoop down like he mad at it and I think, slow down, Richie. It was like watching your own boy run out into traffic.”

“You think he was in on the robbery?”

“Not for the money. Well, some. You see neighbors never even jaywalked all their lives throwing bricks and grabbing anything they can throw their arms around you get to thinking whatever you take ain’t half what’s owed. It wasn’t the money, though. It was the taking.”

“His story is he never even knew the robbery was going down. He started the fire just to start the fire. He thinks he was set up.”

“Not by Davy.”

“Not by Davy. Have you ever seen this man?” I showed him the printout photograph, pointing at Alfred Hendriks.

“I seen him somewheres. On TV, I think.”

“Anywhere else? Twenty years ago, maybe, and much younger?”

“Son, my mother died fifteen years ago. I don’t hardly remember what
she
looked like.”

“Just a stab.” I put away the printout. “Where were you Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Jackson?”

“Over at the A ’n’ P. I do the shopping Wednesdays.”

“Anyone see you?”

“What happened Wednesday?” he asked.

“Someone tried to stop DeVries on the road outside Marquette. I was there. So was someone else, and the description he gave of the man behind it could fit you.”

“Be a tough fit. I never been that far north. I ain’t drove a car in eight years. You see anything in my driveway besides what the neighbor’s dog left there?”

“It wasn’t much of a description. It just occurred to me someone might blame DeVries for your son’s death.”

“
I
do.”

This was a new voice. I looked at the top of the uncarpeted staircase by the front door, where an old black woman in a floor-length yellow nightgown trimmed with lace stood supporting herself on the railing. Her hair was white and sleep-tangled and her face had the startled look that faces sometimes take on when their owners can’t get over the fact that they’ve become old. She was trembling fit to shake the whole second story.

“Woman, what you doing up without your walker?” Jackson braced his hands on the arms of his chair.

“Richie killed our Davy,” she said.

I put out my cigarette in the candy dish. I felt as if I’d been caught smoking behind the barn.

“I can understand your thinking he’s responsible, Mrs. Jackson.”

“Responsible? He killed him. Killed him.”

Jackson made a little noise that took my attention off his wife. His eyes were shut tight, making a cracked mud sculpture of his face. Only his knuckles turning yellow on the chair arms showed life.

“Tell him, Cleveland.”

He opened his eyes slowly. I swore I could hear the lids grating like old shutters. Then he breathed, and it really was like watching a statue become animated, the dead cells blinking on like tiny lights. “It wasn’t nothing.” He rubbed his palms up and down the arms of the chair. “Something that big lieutenant said.”

“What lieutenant?” I asked.

“The one that come to talk to us after Davy got killed. What was his name, Emmaline?”

“Orlander. Lieutenant Floyd Orlander.” It sounded like a catechism.

“Orlander, that was it. He said the cops didn’t shoot Davy and neither did the ’Guards. The bullet they took out of him at the autopsy didn’t belong to any of their guns. Orlander thought one of the other robbers shot him.”

“DeVries.”

“Maybe. The stickup was like right around the corner and them ’Guards didn’t have their eyes on Richie the whole time, what with their attention being split between them. Davy was backshot behind the building running away.”

“Why kill one of your own partners?”

“He wanted it all,” said Mrs. Jackson. “Greed, that’s one of the sins.”

“Nobody ever said it was him done it, woman. He didn’t have no gun when they picked him up.”

“He threw it in the fire.”

“Somebody else got the money,” I said. “He never left the arson scene.”

Jackson said, “Orlander thought Richie and the others worked it out before the robbery. Davy was kind of loud, especially when he drank. They shut him up and sweetened their own pile to boot. Only Richie got grabbed before he could take his split.”

“Sounds like Orlander had it in for him.”

“Them sportswriters was starting to notice Richie. Some white folks just can’t stand watching a brother pick hisself up. I can’t say if Orlander was like that. His partner was. He had this rat-face sergeant who would of looked right fine decked out in a sheet and dunce cap. I don’t remember his name. Emmaline?”

She shook her head. Her face was shining. The strain of holding herself up was getting to her.

“Mean man,” Jackson said. “Wouldn’t sit down in my house. Like he was afraid he get something on his pants. It was like I never left Mississippi.”

“I read up on the case. I never saw anything about Davy being shot by one of his own.”

“Hot time. Maybe they didn’t want to stir nothing up.”

“Makes sense. They’d never have made a case like that stick anyway, without the weapon.” I rose. “ Thanks, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson. You didn’t have anything to do with what happened up north. I had to ask.”

“I would of if I could,” she said. “I’m just sorry they didn’t kill him.”

“Woman, you don’t mean that. Killing’s a bigger sin than greed.”

“I’d burn in hell happy.”

He pushed himself out of his chair, caught his balance, and went up to help her back to bed, using the railing all the way. I waited. I wanted to ask if “redstick ranger” meant anything to him. It took me five minutes to realize he wasn’t coming back down. Outside, the fresh air washed over me like a spray of clean water.

I
HADN’T EATEN
since Grayling. I ordered off the dinner menu in a seafood place on Grand, made easy work of a bass served in horseradish, and mounted a partially successful expedition for clams in the chowder. Thus sustained I penetrated enemy territory, the granite columns at 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters.

One of the better-looking cops in the Criminal Investigation Division was showing some leg on the edge of Sergeant Cranmer’s desk in Robbery, reading items from a hot sheet in her hand over the telephone. She had her brown hair pinned back to beat the heat and a couple of buttons undone on a gray silk blouse to raise the temperature of everyone else in the squad room. Her skirt was matador red and just a little less than knee-length when she was sitting, dangling a silver sandal off her right foot. She answered to Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler.

“Demoted?” I asked when she had hung up.

“Cranmer’s out sick. I’m adding his job to the three others I’ve been doing since Easter.” She adjusted her tortoiseshell rims. “Is there something wrong with your neck, or are you working on your Cary Grant?”

“Honorable injury. I’ve been out diving for the
Edmund Fitzgerald.
Alderdyce around? He isn’t in his office.”

“Turn around, Mr. Detective,” she said.

I’d walked right past him. He had his broad back to me at the copying machine by the door, coatless, with his salmon-colored shirt pasted to his skin in patches and the curved grip of his department .38 hooking his right kidney. I flipped Lieutenant Thaler a salute and left her.

John Alderdyce jumped a foot when I used his name. He turned his dark hacked-out face on me. “Why don’t you use a cattle prod?” he snapped. “I haven’t killed a man since supper last night. My average is slipping.”

“Next time I’ll whistle. What put you on the stick?”

“The heat. The crime statistics. Double shifts. Everybody calls in sick when the sun comes out. Having rank means you get to keep everyone else’s job for them. If you’re really lucky you’ll make commissioner and die before you’re fifty. How the hell are you?”

“My neck hurts. But I’m working. Can we talk in your office? Soon as you’re through making copies of your hand.”

The machine had kicked out four sheets while his left palm was resting on the glass. He swore and turned it off. “Doing khaki work now, for chrissake. Next they’ll have me scrubbing toilets. Let’s make it quick.”

I held the door while he drummed the copies together and tipped them into a tattered interoffice envelope. On the way out he glimpsed Mary Ann Thaler, making another call at the sergeant’s desk. “You ought to spring for dinner sometime,” he told me. “You two might wind up married and raising little sleuths in West Bloomfield.”

“I never date cops. Just when you’re ready to pop the question over candles they decide to bust the violinist for disturbing the peace. They’re as romantic as a soft-nosed slug.” I fell into step beside him in the hallway.

“Suit yourself. I bet she’s warm and smells like pink soap. I bet she wears shortie p.j.’s.”

“Under or over the shoulder holster?”

“Look who’s romantic.”

“How’s Marian?”

“Edgy as hell. Too early to tell if we belong back together. The kids are great. Most of their friends have parents with different zip codes.”