23

THE 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.

I went through the mail I hadn’t looked at earlier. I wrote out checks for a second and a final notice and put them in envelopes and addressed and stamped them, filed the invoices, slit open the junk just for exercise, and threw it after the cellophane. I dumped the ashtray and stared at the telephone and wondered why no one had need of a private investigator on weekends. It rang.

“Walker?”

“Speaking.”

“Floyd Orlander, remember me?”

“I remember, Lieutenant.”

“Forget that shit. I been retired longer than I held the rank. Listen, I was wondering — ”

“The rest of it was drowned out by a roaring on his end. He was calling from his home at the end of the runway. When the noise died I asked him to repeat it.

“I was wondering how you were coming with that DeVries thing. I been thinking about it ever since you were here.”

“Is there something you didn’t tell me?”

“I gave you what I had. What it is, I been thinking about that miserable partner I had, what a bigoted son of a bitch he was, and how things were after the riots. I mean between black and white. I was a straight cop. I don’t like what I been thinking.”

“You think maybe you and Sergeant Drake railroaded DeVries into prison?”

“I don’t mean we made anything up, twisted things around to make him look guilty. Maybe we didn’t look as hard as we would of if things were different, that’s all I’m saying. I still think he did it. I’m just wondering if that’s why we made the case.”

“Have you been discussing this with your wife, Mr. Orlander?”

“Yeah, but what’s she got to do with anything? I’m saying what I’m saying.”

“Thanks for saying it.”

“I’m not using you for a priest. If you need help I’m offering it. Maybe it’s time this thing went by the numbers.”

“I hope you still feel that way after you watch tonight’s news.” I gave him the official version.

“Think he did it?” he said after a moment.

“No.”

“You got faith.”

“The evidence of things unseen.”

“Just the kind the D.A. loves. Anyway the offer holds.”

“Thanks, Mr. Orlander. At the moment I’m stuck in neutral myself.”

“Maybe now I can look at my grandkids and see my grandkids.”

I cradled the receiver and left my hand on it. Cops. Just when you’ve got the plant classified as a noxious weed it sends up a blossom.

Quitting time came and went. I stayed. The longer I sat there the less respect I had for my brains. When I left, whenever it was, Barry would call right after; it was some kind of law. The telephone rang. It was John Alderdyce.

“Hear from your client?”

I sat back. “That means you haven’t.”

“His parole cop told us where he’s staying. I wonder why he hasn’t shown.”

“I didn’t tip him.”

“How’s he know we’re looking for him if he didn’t cap Hendriks?”

“Hell, John, I was by the Alamo. You can smell cop from Belle Isle.”

I heard a bureaucratic buzzing in the background. He was at 1300. Finally he said, “Listen, I ran your Frances Souwaine through the computer. She’s dead.”

“Dead how?”

“Wrapped her Corvair around an Edison pole on Hastings in 1968. If it didn’t happen, though, some pimp would’ve got her or she’d have tripped out someday and lost the way back. Couple of busts for solicitation on her sheet and ninety days in DeHoCo for possession of LSD. Whatever happened to LSD?”

“Where’s Timothy Leary?”

“Doing a road show with G. Gordon Liddy last I heard. We’re old.”

“John, has it occurred to you that everyone involved in that armored car robbery is dead?”

“All but one,” he said. “You know the drill: you hear from your client, I hear from you. He can’t hide. All he’s got to do is stand up. He’s a parolee wanted for questioning in a murder case and he’s considered armed. I don’t have to tell you what that means.”

“You’d think it would’ve changed in twenty years.”

“In court, yeah. The street’s still the street.” The line clicked and hummed.

I gave it another ten minutes, then locked up. It was what I had a service for. Then I had to run back from the stairs and fumble with the keys and spear the receiver on the fourth ring. It was Barry, instructing me to meet him at his place in Harper Woods at ten o’clock, and to bring the disks.