IT WAS THE DAMNEDEST case, and knowing where to find the man I had been paid to look for was no help. It was like one of those game shows where they give you the answer and you have to come up with the question. I took the Edsel Ford eastbound into Detroit, eating cool air coming in through the windows and listening to the not-so-distant sound of Richard DeVries’s twenty-year fuse burning low. It sounded just like a big black jet waiting its turn at the runway in Floyd Orlander’s backyard.
Exiting the expressway, I found myself pointed south and kept going. That way lay knowledge. Most of what little I knew about the case had revealed itself while I was moving in that direction. It was a deal more tidy than sacrificing farm animals.
Downriver is a mystical name to most Detroiters, as the New World was to Europeans in the sixteenth century; a place where dragons drank the blood of mariners and pretty women sat in their underwear on rocks, plucking at lyres and waiting for ships to sail too close. Geographically it refers to a collection of bedroom communities strung out south of the city on the U.S. side of the international border, factory towns with dirty air and clean streets protected by lamps and the cyclops eye of the Neighborhood Watch. Some of the communities have French names to remind their neighbor to the north of the explorers who brought the world to the bend in the river that the Indians called the Crooked Way. But it’s a wasted effort, because the city is barely aware of its satellites, and everything it doesn’t understand it calls downriver.
Civilized gray smoke was leaning from the stacks of the old tractor plant-turned high tech automotive center when I swung through the opening in the chainlink fence. No guard appeared, so I rolled on until I found a space in the dozens of rows of parked vehicles with security stickers on their windshields and got out. The pavement was spongy in the late-afternoon heat and made little smacking sounds when I lifted my feet.
A red-painted fire door bore the legend AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in yellow stencil. I pulled it open. Inside, a guard in a gray uniform looked up from the sandwich he was eating behind a library table. A fan with a white plastic housing blew hard-boiled egg odor at me.
“Security badge,” he said, spitting bits of egg-white. He was a hard-looking number with graying hair and black eyebrows and a neck like a pork butt. His revolver rode high on his hip with its black rubber grip showing above the table.
I let him see my ID. “Mr. Piero in the Detroit office said to use his name.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“He gives out his name like I give out hundred-dollar bills. Offices or plant?”
“Offices.”
He reached into a corrugated box full of colored Lucite tags on the table and held out a blue one. “Hang that on your pocket and take the elevator down the hall. No detours.”
It was stamped with a large white numeral twelve. I clipped it to my handkerchief pocket and followed a narrow hallway covered in painted corkboard to a single elevator. There were no buttons for individual floors inside, just UP and DOWN. When the doors opened to let me out I made room for a brunette in a peach-colored business suit, who glanced at my tag.
“I used to be a thirteen,” I said.
She was turning that over when the doors sealed us off from each other. Anyway it beat finding myself in the middle of a brawl.
It was one of those fast-food offices with three women behind a reception counter and rows of waist-high partitions opposite it with desks between them and men and women working like ants at the desks. I asked for Alfred Hendriks.
“When is your appointment?” The woman who responded was at the other end of the counter from the one I’d addressed. She had silver-rinsed hair and rimless glasses and looked over her shoulder at me from a cabinet where she was filing something. I recognized her quality-controlled voice from the telephone that morning. I said I didn’t have an appointment and told her my name.
She turned her head away. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hendriks is out.”
“Would he be in if I said I’m from Stutch Petrochemicals?”
“Are you?”
“No. I tried it before. It can’t work twice. When will he be in?”
“He didn’t say. You can wait if you like.”
I took a seat and flipped through a glossy copy of something called Modem Aerodynamics. It had a cartoon page but the jargon was out of my reach. I laid it aside and lit a cigarette.
I had been there ten minutes when a woman entered from another hallway and stopped before the counter. She was tall and slender and had on a suit that looked as if it had been designed for a whole different kind of business from those I’d been looking at. It was satin, for one thing, and a shade of blue you don’t usually see in offices this side of Las Vegas. Her hair was shoulder-length and deep auburn — it would be red in sunlight — her complexion fair, and she had high cheekbones accentuated by hollows and Mongol eyes helped along with a breath of mascara at the corners. They didn’t need help.
“Is my husband in?” Her voice hung somewhere around the middle register and reminded me for some reason of magnolias and Georgian columns. I’d never been to Georgia and didn’t know either of them from asparagus.
“Go right in, Mrs. Marianne,” said the receptionist with the glasses. “He’s expecting you.”
She walked past me, heels snicking, and around the counter, where a hallway swallowed her up. The place was lousy with hallways. I smelled a spring night for several minutes after I lost sight of her.
I smoked another cigarette and listened to the room. A woman called the Free Press to add something to a full-page advertisement she’d placed earlier for tomorrow’s edition. A man complained to someone on the telephone that his middle initial was missing from a nameplate he’d ordered. Two guys laid bets over the partition separating them on that night’s game with New York. The woman called back the Free Press to cancel the advertisement. It was a going office.
The redhead in the blue suit came out of the hallway behind the counter and left the way she’d come. She hadn’t learned to walk the way she did watching Aunt Pittipat.
I got up and leaned on the counter by the woman with the glasses. “ That Timothy Marianne’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“She looks like a model.”
“She was.” She folded her arms atop her workspace. If she had on make-up behind the granny lenses it was strictly basic. She was younger than she tried to appear. “They met at the auto show when he was with Ford. He took her off the hood of a brand new Thunderbird. I thought everyone knew that story. It was in People and everything.”
“I guess I was wasting my time with Billy Budd that week. Do you need those?”
She touched the glasses. “Only to see with. Why?”
“You ought to try contact lenses. Green ones. And shampoo that tinsel out of your hair. What are you really, twenty, twenty-two?”
“Twenty-five. And you’re out of bounds.”
“Just restless. Mr. Hendriks get in?”
“You didn’t see him, did you?”
“I figured there was a back way. You know, like Al Capone had.”
“Who?”
“He was an Italian saint. Forget him. Might Mr. Marianne be free?”
“When is your appointment?” She’d turned on the deep freeze.
“We did that already. Tell him it’s about his general manager, Alfred Hendriks. And an old robbery-murder.”
The room got quiet, or maybe it just seemed that way because all three of the receptionists were looking at me. After a moment, Specs lifted the receiver off her intercom and flipped a switch.