IT WAS A BLUE single-breasted today, with a matching cap and visor planted on the back of his head as if to halt the retreat of the curly hair. If I knew my chauffeur’s etiquette, it meant he was driving blue today instead of the gray Cadillac. When I entered the waiting room he rose lazily from the upholstered bench, grinning in his beard.
“You’re more important than I had figured,” he said. “The old man almost never works this time of day.” He handed me a gray cardboard folder sealed with shiny black tape.
“Do I tip you or what?”
“You could if you want your arm broken. I left all that when I went to work for the Commodore. You get any sleep? You look awful.”
“It’s my love life.”
“Man, I hope she’s worth it.” He pulled the cap forward. “Anything back?”
“Tell him thanks and I’ll be in touch.”
When he’d gone I picked up my mail, unlocked the inner office, and put the mail on the desk without looking at it. I slit the tape with a letter opener I never used and spread out the folder’s contents. Personnel at Wayne State and the University of Michigan had worked fast to get student transcripts printed out and hand-delivered to the mansion in Crosse Pointe, and Cambridge had worked just as fast to cable information across the Atlantic to a terminal at Stutch Petrochemicals. There would be scholarships involved, maybe a college or two. Here and there someone had penned clarifying comments in the margins in a faint but steady hand that had to be the Commodore’s. It had all been supervised by someone who either didn’t know or refused to acknowledge that in the computer age nothing has to go anywhere without collecting dust and disinterest on several desks in between.
After twenty minutes I swiveled away and looked out the window at the roof of the tax office next door, where a half-naked workman burned brown to the waist was spreading tar. What I’d found out looked the same when I was watching him as when I was reading it in print and the old man’s spidery script.
A scholarship had come through for Alfred Hendriks, a freshman studying at Wayne State, to enroll in the Cambridge School of Economics beginning in April 1967. He didn’t register for classes until that fall, pleading delay due to a death in the family. Mail and messages until then were to be forwarded to an apartment address on Detroit’s Twelfth Street in care of a Frances Souwaine. She would be a skinny blonde hippie-type, although there was no mention of that in the folder. Whether she was or not, it put Hendriks where Richard DeVries said he was at the time of the riots in July.
The other item of interest, included only because the Commodore was thorough and got everything, was a copy of an application for a student loan from the University of Michigan, where Hendriks had taken his accounting degree in 1970. Under PAST EMPLOYMENT Hendriks had listed several positions, including a part-time bookkeeping job at a quick-print shop on Brady.
It wasn’t court evidence. All it meant was that Hendriks had planned and conducted the robbery for which DeVries had gone to prison. He had finessed DeVries into bombing a building as cover and had shot Davy Jackson, his own accomplice, in the act of fleeing the scene. But not where the statue of the lady with the blindfold was concerned. She had to have it in her lap.
I slid all the papers back inside the folder, resealed it with the tape, and locked it in the safe with my shirts and underwear. Then I closed the office and fired up the rented Renault and took off for the National Bank Building, where according to Marianne, Hendriks was working overtime on a Saturday. On the way I unholstered the Smith & Wesson and checked the cylinder. The chambered cartridges glinted golden in the sun. Maybe he’d confess and I’d arrest him, just like on TV.
The lobby was nearly deserted, as was the street out front. Lake St. Clair would be jammed with tanning bodies and bright sails. Hendriks and I seemed to be the only ones on company time that afternoon. I punched the button for the express elevator and waited. None of the others stopped at the Marianne offices. I tried twice more. It was out of order. I took the local to the next closest floor and climbed the stairs the rest of the way. Stairwells reveal the true nature of a building. This one was as bleak as a banker’s compassion.
The fire door let me into an anonymous hallway lined with locked doors without identifying signs. Light from a window at the end streamed unbroken down a square tunnel smelling of Mop ’n’ Glo, silent but for an echoing noise somewhere on that floor. At first I thought it was a truck on the expressway. More trundle than rumble, it sounded like a bored child rolling a supermarket cart back and forth, over and over across an uneven floor. I stood listening to it for several seconds before I could tell which direction it was coming from. Then I turned and started that way along the corridor, following my own gray shadow.
No one appeared for the hall’s entire length. My footsteps clapped back on themselves from the walls. They were the only footsteps on that floor.
A door stood ajar a third of the way down. I pushed it open farther and looked at a computer terminal on a steel desk with a swivel chair turned at a right angle. The screen was blank but for the word HOLD Hashing on and off in emerald green in its center. A manual the size of a monk’s Bible lay closed on top of the terminal. I withdrew my head. The noise, louder now, seemed to have taken on a distinct rhythm, like a conga line. For no reason that I could put words to I reached back and closed my hand around the butt of the revolver in its holster.
The hall cornered around at the end, where I started down another just as long, the gun out now. The noise was louder yet. At midpoint another short passage divided the inner wall to my right. This was the reception area, where DeVries had trashed two guards yesterday. The noise was there. An arm was there too, on the floor and sticking out from the wall in a dark coatsleeve.
I kept to that wall as I approached it. A head of dark hair sprinkled with gray lay on the arm. Both protruded from inside the express elevator car, where the doors kept trying to close, encountered the arm, and shunted back open to try again. The trundling was hypnotic.
I put the gun in both hands, stepped away from the wall, and executed a policeman’s turn, covering the interior of the car. It was full of dead man and air conditioning. The walls were paneled in smoked glass, starred in three places at the rear where something the size of my finger had struck it. The carpet was stained dark. Part of the stain overlapped into the hallway. The edge smeared when I touched it with a toe.
I didn’t look for a pulse. When the doors were open, Alfred Hendriks’ one visible eye looked past my shoulder, admiring a view I hoped not to see for a long time. He hadn’t been planning on it himself as late as yesterday. It made you think about tomorrow.
Not for long, though. I put away the gun and stepped inside to search those pockets I could reach without disturbing the body. You never know what might show up in a lab these days. His wallet held cab fare and enough cards in plastic windows to clear up the deficit, at least until the bills came. I put it back and took out a leather folder containing the keys to his Porsche and a couple of others. That I pocketed. The contact my hands made with his skin told me he’d begun to cool but not yet to stiffen.
That was as much as his body could tell me. I couldn’t be any more thorough without getting blood on my hands and clothes. (“Kind of sloppy with the spaghetti sauce there. Walker. You won’t mind if Forensics has a look at your tie.”) I left him, not paying much attention now to how much noise I was making. Whoever had done the shooting was as long gone as the smell of spent powder.
Hendriks’ name was lettered in gold on a frosted panel in the front corridor. The first key I tried unlocked the door. More cold-blooded design had gone into this office than into Marianne’s downriver: From deep red pile to hand-rubbed walnut to thick unread first editions on built-in shelves the place was rigged for power. Even the window was bigger, although not nearly as large as the one in Commodore Stutch’s study in Crosse Pointe. The chairs were covered in maroon leather and an Impressionist painting of a locomotive charging through a misty night hung in a heavy gilt frame on one wall. The artist had left it unsigned, but the odds said he was French and dead.
I lifted a corner of the painting, looked at bare paneling behind it, and let it back down. I inspected the carpeting around the desk but there were no breaks or seams where a floor safe might have been installed. The desk was tidy, with no papers or folders left on top. Even the calendar was bare of notations. A neat man, Hendriks. Or a careful one. The drawers were locked. I selected the smallest key on the ring, inserted it in the slot in the top drawer, and turned it. Somewhere inside, a bar slid out of a track, releasing all the drawers.
I wasted time on pencils and stationery until I reached the second drawer on the right side. There a basket rack had been mounted to hold half a dozen computer disks upright in paper sleeves. Each pocket except two was labeled in neat felt-tip capitals on strips of masking tape; current and projected expenditures and profits and monthly business correspondence were all assigned to their proper pockets, each sleeve marked accordingly to keep them from getting mixed up. The remaining two pockets were blank. One of them was empty. I drew the disk out of the other. The sleeve was blank as well. I put them in my coat pocket.
More desk stuff in the other drawers, all good quality but boring. I lifted things from the top and looked under them. Nothing, not even some respectable dust. Where the disk was that belonged in the last pocket bothered me. Then I realized what else was missing from the office, and then I remembered. I touched everything I’d touched a second time, this time with a handkerchief to remove prints, and left the room.
The doors were still trying to close when I passed the elevator alcove. I didn’t know how to stop them short of moving the body, and anyway Hendriks didn’t seem to mind. Around the corner I found the door still open to the room containing the computer terminal. Inside I found something else, a blank paper sleeve with nothing in it on the desk next to the machine.
HOLD was still flashing onscreen. I sat down and studied the keyboard. That didn’t tell me anything so I hoisted down the manual from atop the terminal and did some homework. After ten minutes I put it back and punched the key marked ACCESS. If what I’d read made sense and HOLD meant the file was still open, I was already past Security.
The screen went blank and stayed that way for a second. I was starting to think I’d erased the disk in the machine when it began to print out. From left to right the bright green characters darted across in three neat vertical rows headed INVESTOR, AMT INVEST, and DATE, line after line, striping the screen faster than the human hand could type or the human eye could follow. When it finished, the screen was full, with the little green blip that had towed out the data flashing on and off at the end of the last line, awaiting further instructions.
I didn’t have any for it even if I knew how to enter them. I was looking into a universe beyond my tight little orbit of thugs and grifters, bad-check artists and runaway daughters. There were too many abbreviations and acronyms in the left-hand row, too many digits in the middle. I had once held a thousand-dollar bill and another time I had peeked inside a briefcase containing several hundred thousand in neat bills bricked and banded. Millions were abstract numbers in a newspaper article with a Washington dateline. Glimmering there onscreen, all those zeroes presented black holes for a man to fall into and never find bottom. They were like dead men’s eyes. Hendriks’ had been the last to see them, just before he had toppled in.
I shook off their spell and looked for the key that would eject the disk. I didn’t think the disk in my pocket would tell me much more than this one. Someone who spoke the language might. At length the machine kicked it out through a slot in the side and I put it in its sleeve and slid the slim package into my other side pocket. I flipped off the power switch and wiped my prints off the keyboard with my handkerchief. Then I got up and turned toward the doorway, where the guard DeVries had put on the floor yesterday was crouching with his gun pointed at my heart.