Downriver (18 page)

“Time?”

He shrugged. “Today. When I know what he had for breakfast and when, I’ll pin it down.”

Alderdyce made the rounds of the uniforms and plainclothesmen, interviewing each separately in murmurs like a stage director. Finally he came to the guard at the reception desk. “Where’s your Mr. Fierro?” he asked.

“Piero. Vermont. His vacation started today. Otherwise you’d be talking to him instead of me. If it wasn’t bad public relations.”

“Describe the black man you had trouble with here yesterday.”

He gave a fair description of DeVries, adding four or five inches to his height. It was a natural error. Alderdyce said, “Okay, thanks. Did the detectives get your address and phone number?”

“Yeah.”

“Go home then.”

“I got four hours left on this shift.”

“Spend them on the other floor. Nobody’s going to walk away with the place while we’re here.”

The guard got up and headed for the stairs. Alderdyce spent a few more minutes with Toynbee and Banks, then sent them back to 1300 to write up their report. Toynbee hesitated. “What about this guy?”

“He didn’t kill anyone today.”

“He was heeled.”

“So’s three-quarters of the local population. If you want to bust someone, get out a reader on Richard DeVries.” He spelled the last name. “Have Lansing wire his mug and prints and ask them who’s handling his parole. He’s fresh out of Marquette.”

Toynbee wrote it down in his notebook and turned to go. “Oh, congratulations, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks.”

I got rid of my cigarette and looked up at Alderdyce. “Inspectors’ list come out?”

“I’m on it. As soon as seven inspectors die or retire I get to move up a notch. Or if they add seven new precincts. What happened?”

“I found him. Then the guard found me.”

“How’d you know he’d be here?”

“Marianne told me he was working.”

His brow puckered. “Lieutenant Thaler?”

“Not her, the other one. Timothy Marianne. I had lunch with him today, sort of.”

“Busy weekend.”

“About par. I found a corpse and almost got laid.”

“When’s the last time you saw your client?”

“This morning.”

“What’s his beef with Hendriks?”

“Not here.”

He glanced around. The morgue team had arrived and a man in a plaid sportcoat and green tie was dusting the control panel for prints. “ There a room somewhere?”

I nodded toward the leather key folder on the reception desk. “One of those probably fits Hendriks’ office door.”

“Probably?”

“The guard came before I could check it out.”

“Uh-huh. Let’s do.” He picked up the folder.

I stood and fell into step beside him. “What about my gun? Banks took it with him.”

“You know how that works.”

“Last time nobody cleaned it for six weeks.”

“You still got that unregistered Luger?”

“What unregistered Luger?”

“Just keep it out of my sight. The commissioner’s watching me.” He found the right door and let us into the dead man’s office.

“This is warrant country,” I said. “What’s the commissioner say about violating the Bill of Rights?”

“The Constitution’s been suspended in Detroit, didn’t you hear? We got TV cameras on street corners and in public rest rooms. Traffic’s out conducting unlawful searches for drunk drivers.” He trailed his fingers over the desk’s glossy surface. “This guy did all right for himself. Too bad he croaked.”

“To think it all started with two hundred grand in stolen bills.”

He stuck his hands in his pants pockets and waited. Either consciously or unconsciously, he had maneuvered to have the desk between us.

“DeVries saw a picture of Hendriks in stir,” I said. “He recognized him as the college kid who put him up to firing that building. Some of the serial numbers from the armored car job were on record, so Hendriks kept his profile down for a few years, first while the money was being laundered and then to avoid drawing attention to himself . He even took out a student loan from the U of M to tide him over. He went to work in the accounting department at Ford and eventually invested what he’d stolen in Marianne Motors.”

“All this on a picture?”

“Hendriks told me he was in England when the riots and the robbery took place. Except the records say he didn’t go there until the following fall. Meanwhile he was living where DeVries met him, in an apartment on Twelfth Street with a blonde named Frances Souwaine. She may have been an accomplice, or maybe not. The point is he lied.”

“So he lied. So far I wouldn’t tie up a man to question him if he were alive.”

“I think you would. You’ve got instincts same as me. But try this. According to his loan application at Michigan he was working part-time at a place called Merc-U-Print on Brady during the summer of 1967.”

“Brady’s where they hit the car,” he said.

“It was there to transport cash from businesses threatened by the riots to the bank. Someone working in one of the stores — especially a bookkeeper, which is what Hendriks was — would know the car would be there at that time. It gave him time to plan the robbery and set DeVries up for the fall.”

“Why kill Jackson?”

“Maybe they fell out. Maybe Hendriks wanted Jackson’s cut. The heist had gone down, they were running away, and his services were no longer needed. The other possibility is that with Jackson dead and identified at the scene, DeVries stood a better chance of taking the frame. He and Jackson were known to be friends. It would blow some of the heat off whoever else was involved.”

“Too risky. Hendriks couldn’t know DeVries wouldn’t put it together and talk.”

“Maybe. He’d seen how drunk and disoriented DeVries could get on at least one occasion. By getting him drunk again he might fog the details just enough. Or not. He needed the fire as a diversion and arsonists were escaping arrest all over the place. DeVries not being able to tell the cops anything might have been just a lucky fall.”

Alderdyce started looking in drawers. I’d left the desk unlocked. “You’re overlooking the most likely scenario. DeVries was in on the plan from the start. I don’t buy him being as dumb as you say.”

“Your way he was dumb enough to choose eighteen to thirty over the deal the cops offered him for talking. You can’t have it both ways.”

“You can’t, but I can. You’d have to be black in the middle of a rebellion and be asked to trust a white police department.” He paused over the drawer containing the rack not quite full of computer disks. “You sure you weren’t in here?”

“I won’t say it wasn’t on my list.”

“What were you doing in the computer room?”

“Frisking the place. The door was open.”

“Find anything?”

“Not a thing.”

“Machine on or off when you got to it?”

“Off.”

“Funny, I felt it on my way in. It felt warm.”

“You didn’t feel it.”

He slid a thumb over the rack. Then he closed the drawer. “You’re right. I didn’t. Anyway I hope your client enjoyed his little vacation. He’s going back for life. Not that I blame him for killing Hendriks. If I did two dimes without pay I’d figure I had something coming.”

“He didn’t kill him.”

“Who did?”

“Someone he trusted. You don’t sneak up on a person in that hall.”

“DeVries could’ve been waiting when Hendriks stepped out of the elevator. Or he could’ve marched him there at gunpoint and drilled him as he was stepping inside.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. It was one of the reasons I wasn’t on the force.

T
HE BANK BUILDING LOBBY
was quiet, obsequiously so. I might have been in a cathedral on Martin Luther’s birthday. When I slotted a quarter into the telephone, the rattle echoed.

“Yes.”

How Raf got so much Arabic intonation into so short a word was a mystery. I said, “Walker, the Commodore included this number in some stuff he sent me today. Can you take him a message?”

“He’s sleeping.”

“I think he’ll want you to wake him up for this one.”

The roast I hadn’t eaten at the Mariannes’ had come back to haunt me. Maybe it had to do with Alfred Hendriks being dead meat, but I had to have some. After Raf and I finished talking I bought a sack of burgers at a White Castle and ate them in the car. I didn’t feel like fit company for people.

I turned on the radio, heard some music, and listened to the news. Hendriks wasn’t on it. By the next report he would be; Detroit is a reporters’ town. I turned it off and ate and thought. Mostly I ate.

I went back with John Alderdyce further than anybody. In that time I had given up trying to trace the workings of his mind. There was no telling which way he’d have run with a piece of evidence like Edith Marianne’s nighttime ride with Hendriks. It suggested a couple of simple explanations. Cops like their murders simple, and the murderers usually oblige, theirs being the one crime almost always perpetrated by amateurs. But you dug your hole plenty deep when you expected Alderdyce to think like most cops. What went on in the Commodore’s century-old skull was one for the archaeologists. So I sat on the information. I felt like one of those birds that squat in strange nests and never know if they’re hatching another bird or a snake.

That line of thinking was about as nourishing as the burgers. I hit the ignition, then had to sit back and wait for the battery to recharge itself before starting the Renault. Finally it turned over and caught and I took Woodward down to Jefferson.

I didn’t stop at the Alamo. A gray four-door Chrysler without chrome was parked on that side of the street with two men in the front seat. They had their coats on and the windows up. The temperature was in the high eighties and they were sitting in the sun, but you can only turn down some two-way radios so low and they wouldn’t want the noise leaking out. It told me two things: DeVries wasn’t in, and we don’t pay our police near enough. Not being in a position to change either situation I doubled back into town, parked behind a truck unloading mammoth rolls of newsprint onto a dock on Lafayette, and went into the
News
building. There the female security guard called upstairs and told me Barry Stackpole was out playing racquetball at the Detroit Athletic Club.

Before the glaziers and steelworkers won the architectural wars, Albert Kahn left his thumbprints all over downtown in the form of Italian Renaissance arcades and Greek pilasters. The DAC combines both in a seven-story candy box just off the Grand Circle on Madison. I used the defunct county star in my ID folder to bluff my way past the silver-haired gent at the front desk and went to the courts. A ball exploded off the wall next to my ear when I opened the door.

“Idiot! Tired of your head?” Barry caught the ball on the fly and smashed it against the concrete wall on the other side.

It was no way to greet an old war buddy, but then we hadn’t spoken much over the past year or so, and when we had it dealt with our respective businesses. We’d gone from friends to two guys who knew each other; never mind why. I said, “I thought exercise was good for your health.”

“Bullshit. It keeps you from assaulting people.” He caromed the ball off the floor and wall and backhanded it when it returned. He was wearing a green-and-white Michigan State basketball jersey plastered to his cylindrical torso and gray sweatpants that covered his artificial leg. Sweat had slicked and darkened his hair, streamlining his head like a seal’s.

“They told me racquetball was a two-man sport.”

“My opponents say I’m too aggressive. I don’t see it.” He slapped the wall three times in almost the same spot, leaving marks like grouped revolver shots. Finally he bounced the ball off the floor near his feet and stood dribbling it with the short racquet. “What’s the headline?”

“ ‘Auto Executive Murdered.’ ”

“No good. Passive voice. Give me a lead.”

“ ‘Police found Alfred Hendriks, general manager of Marianne Motors, shot to death in the elevator of the corporation’s headquarters in the National Bank Building.’ “

“Too busy. And you left out when.”

“About two hours ago.”

“As a journalist you’re hell for sleuthing. Who and how come?”

“Why I’m here,” I said. “Off the blotter?”

“If I get to put it on later.”

“I need an accountant.”

“Tap the lottery?”

“Hendriks kept some kind of ledger on floppy disks that he locked up in his desk unmarked. I need someone who can read it. New Math ruined me for life.”

“So get an accountant. What am I, the Yellow Pages?”

“An accountant who can keep his mouth shut is what I need. You write about organized crime. You must meet them all the time.”

“The ones I know are too good at it. They don’t even talk to me.”

“My client’s on the hook for murder. I doubt he did it. If Hendriks was fooling around with company funds it opens up other avenues.”

He went on dribbling.

“The Commodore’s involved,” I said.

He stopped. “Old Man Stutch?”

“How many Commodores do you know?”

“I interviewed him ten years ago. He was getting set to buy Atlantic City before the Mob took up residence. The deal went sour. If he killed anyone it would be straight up in the middle of Cadillac Square at high noon.”

“That’s the way I read him. Anyway he’s got three quarters of a billion dollars tied up in Marianne. Hendriks was juggling millions. This is no alley mugging.”

He studied the ball. “Amos?”

I waited.

“Hell with it. Not important. Exclusive?”

“Yeah.”

He tossed the ball in the air and slammed it off the door frame. “I’ll get back to you.”

I left. In the old days we’d have struck the bargain on a case of Scotch. When you lose a friend, the price goes up on everything.

In the office time hung like a willow branch. After washing my face and neck in the water closet I turned on the antique fan and watched a twist of cigarette cellophane hop and slither across the floor. That was good for a minute and a half and then it hung up in a corner. I retrieved it and threw it at the wastebasket. Getting it unstuck from the static charge in my fingers was good for another thirty seconds.