NEARING ROMULUS A DC-8 bellying into Detroit Metropolitan Airport dragged its shadow over the Renault, engines shrieking. The slipstream tugged the little car toward the expressway median and the vibration loosened screws in the dash and popped open the glove compartment. When I parked and got out I was surprised not to find skid marks on the roof.
Floyd Orlander, late of the Detroit Police Department, lived in a well-kept tract built bang at the end of a runway, separated from the airport grounds by a thousand feet of cyclone fence and several miles of community optimism. The first time I rang the bell another jet taking off straight over the house swallowed every sound in the neighborhood. No one answered the second time either, although it was in comparative silence. I wondered if the entire household was deaf. I tried knocking.
A minute later the door opened on a gray-haired woman built for comfort in a green print dress and rhinestone glasses with blue lenses, who showed me a nice set of false teeth and said, “Did you ring before? Everyone’s out back.”
“I tried calling earlier, but no one answered,” I said. “Is this the Orlander residence?”
“I’m Mrs. Orlander. If you’re from the city, we’re not selling. We like it here, noise and all.”
“I’m not from the city. My name’s Walker. I’d like to talk to Mr. Orlander about an old police case he worked on.”
“Land, he’s been retired twelve years. It must be old.”
“Is he at home?”
She put her fingers in her ears. It looked like a stall. I asked the question again, raising my voice. Then a jet I hadn’t even heard winding up shattered the sound barrier directly overhead. The ka-thump boxed my ears and rattled crockery in the house.
“Land, that one was low,” she said, taking her fingers out. “There’s an ordinance against it, but we’ll all be dead by the time they hear about it from the FAA. Are you all right, young man?”
I was reading her lips. “How did you know it was coming?”
“I’d explain, but you’d have to have lived here ten years to understand. Follow me, please.”
There were books and a cabinet TV in the living room and glass cabinets full of knickknacks and china in the dining room and built-in appliances in the kitchen. Everything was spaced out and lashed down as tightly as aboard ship. The walls were bare of pictures.
“I bet taxes are low hereabouts,” I said.
“Not low enough. But lower than other places.” She stepped through the screen door in back and held it for me.
The backyard bunted up against the cyclone fence with white pickets on either side. On the square of lawn, a yellow-headed boy and girl of about four were digging holes in a sandbox and throwing the sand out onto the grass. They were twins, dressed identically in red shorts and Smurf T-shirts and barefoot. A heavy big man sat watching them in a canvas deck chair with a glass in his hand. He, too, was barefoot and wore a shirt with parrots on it and khaki shorts and one of those wide-brimmed straw hats with a green plastic eyeshade that gave his face a bilious cast. The face was wide and square and so were his hands and feet. A pitcher of ice and brown liquid stood at his elbow on a pedestal table under a striped umbrella.
“Children, the grass,” said Mrs. Orlander.
“Hell with the grass,” the man said. “They’re my grandkids. What about that beer?”
“Drink your tea. You know what the doctor said.”
“Not as good as you do, goddamn it.”
The girl stopped digging. “Grampa said G.D.”
“Watch your language, Floyd.”
“Yes, Dottie.”
“This is Mr. Walker. He wants to talk to you about something you worked on.”
He started, took off his hat, and looked up at me. The brim had blocked his view. His hair had been red, but had faded to a rinsed-out pink, and was cropped so short he would have looked bald from a distance. He had faded blue eyes and blotched skin and one of those faces that came either with age or from both ends of a lot of beer bottles. He wasn’t that old. After a long look he hung the hat on the arm of his chair and drained his glass.
“You’re since my time. Most of you are, I guess. Changing mayors put a lot of good men back out on the street.”
“I’m not with the department.” I gave him one of my cards. “You worked the DeVries arson case, right?”
“You mean the robbery.” He read the card and floated it in a puddle of iced tea on the table.
“That’s what I wanted to talk about. He may be innocent.”
There was a chaise longue on the other side of the table. Mrs. Orlander took a Ladies’ Home Journal off the flowered cushion, stretched out, and began turning pages. Orlander refilled his glass from the pitcher. “He after a new trial?”
“He’s out.”
“Then what’s the point?”
I played it straight up. “He thinks he knows who pulled off the robbery. If he’s right he wants the money.”
“That’s fair. If he was innocent, which he ain’t.”
“If he isn’t it will come out. I don’t work so well with whitewash. My thinking is you could tell me lots about the robbery that isn’t on record. At the very least it might turn Davy Jackson’s killer.”
“Who told you about that?”
“Jackson’s parents. You don’t think DeVries killed him or you’d have charged him with first-degree murder at the time.”
“Not charging him and not thinking he did it don’t even go to the same school.”
“Do you think he did it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He poured tea into his mouth and swallowed it. “Throwing up smoke to cover a heist is an important job. The guy you give it to can’t be bothered with pulling off a hit besides. The rest of it was planned too tight. They wouldn’t make that mistake. Two guys hit the truck, Jackson and one other. The money wasn’t on Jackson so his buddy capped him during the fade and took off with it. DeVries going down meant he didn’t have to split with nobody.”
“Wouldn’t he be worried about DeVries talking?”
“At that particular time a black perp would of went to the chair before he’d give up another black to the white man’s po-lice.” He whined the last word like Willie Best.
“Thin.”
“You had to be there. You had to see it. Nothing I ever heard or read told it like it was. We had to tell our kids they couldn’t play with their black friends. Had to tell them it wasn’t the kids we were worried about. It was their parents.”
“The robbers wore stocking masks and gloves. How do you know the one that got away was black?”
“Salt and pepper? Not that week.”
A jet canted in for a landing over the fence, making conversation impossible for a minute. The boy and girl went on digging in the sand and never looked up.
“When did you close the case?” I asked when the roar had faded.
“It was still open last I knew. But the snitches didn’t know nothing and the money never turned up and we figured it got laundered someplace, Mexico or someplace. You can only spend so much time on a thing, and we had a city to put back together. Did a rotten job of it too.”
“What about a driver? They wouldn’t have left the getaway car empty with all hell breaking loose.”
“Not so much as a treadmark. Investigating conditions weren’t ideal. Flak jackets and auto-rifles, quick and dirty, get in and out with your ass and whatever you can pick up running.”
“The driver might have been a woman,” I said. “ The man DeVries suspects hung out with a hippie blonde.”
“Age of Aquarius. Peace and love. Shit.”
“Floyd.” Mrs. Orlander didn’t look up from her magazine.
“Yes, Dottie.”
“Who tipped them the armored car would be there?”
“If you got a look at the security in those outfits you’d bury your money in a Mason jar. We couldn’t turn an inside man.”
“Swell.”
“Wish I could remember more,” he said, “but not too bad. DeVries was guilty as hell and we won’t count Jackson. Five hundred was a good average in my day.”
“How’s your partner’s memory?”
“Barney Drake? I heard he blew a vein in his head ten-twelve years ago. His daughter stuck him in a home in California or someplace. I bet they wash him every day and dress him up just like he was folks. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. I never worked with anyone so miserable in my life.”
“Why work with him at all?”
He spread the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and pointed at the web of flesh between them. “See that scar? Well, maybe you can’t so good anymore. Back in ’sixty-two this snitch we was questioning kind of hard behind the old Demosthenes Bar pulled a .45 and stuck it in Barney’s stomach and squeezed off. The punk just never carried, we weren’t ready for it. There wasn’t time to do anything but jam my hand into the action.
After that we sent the sorry snitch to Receiving to get his jaw wired. I saved Barney’s cookies that night.”
“Wouldn’t that make him loyal to you instead of the other way around?”
“Hell no, it made him even more miserable to be with. But you give a man back his life, you just naturally want to hang around and make sure he doesn’t throw it away. I guess he’s grateful out there in the Piss-Your-Pants Home for the Terminally Fucked in Pasadena or wherever it is. Sorry, Dottie.”
“You do the explaining when we send these children home swearing like muleskinners.”
He didn’t hear her. He was looking at the twins, and his thoughts were as clear as the welts on his face. I said, “If they’re raised right they won’t stick you in a place like that.”
“Five minutes alone with my department piece, that’s all I’ll ever ask them for.”
He put on his hat. It was a dismissal, but I wasn’t ready to leave the spot. The sun felt good on my stiff neck. “City looking to expand the airport?”
“Three years now. I’m the one standing in front of it. I bought this place out of my pension, cash on the barrelhead. First place we ever owned. They’ll meet my price or ’doze us both under.”
“What’s your price?”
“Sixty-five.”
“You might get it. In Detroit they’d just invoke eminent domain and roll right over you.”
“It’s why I left. That it?”
I hesitated. “I’m curious about that shoot-out in Judge Lorenzo’s court. It’s not my business.”
“Was I really trying to hit him?”
“That’s the question.”
“That little pimp. You know what he’s doing now? Handling palimony suits for celebrity fags. I should of took aim.”
“I appreciate your time,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah. Good-bye.”
Mrs. Orlander started to get up, but I said I knew the way out. She showed me her dentures. Whatever she’d overheard was nothing on what she’d been hearing for decades. As I turned toward the house, a wrestling match started up in the sandbox. Orlander said if it didn’t stop right now he’d twist some heads off. The boy laughed.