THE LUNCH CROWD had started to wander in. A speaker mounted over the kitchen door crackled, whooshed, and released one of those Aegean tunes that sound like violinists tuning up on a hot griddle. Sherman Miskoupolis finished his meal and set aside his plate. I hadn’t touched my baklava.
“I spent some time last night with someone who knows enough about you to write your family biography,” I said. “You were a long time finding your specialty. A little gambling, a lot of loansharking, some drugs, even a legitimate fishing and charter service back home in Greece. Generally speaking, when a family operation like yours has foreign interests, sooner or later they’re used to lay off goods and cash too hot to handle in the States. Who put Hendriks on to you twenty years ago?”
“Suppose you tell me.”
“Doesn’t matter. He had a live-in hippie girlfriend who probably had drug connections. One affiliate talks to another and pretty soon young Hendriks is here in Greektown eating moussaka with Nicholas or Aristotle or their kid brother Sherman. Maybe he talked to you before the robbery, but you wouldn’t have struck the deal until afterwards when he’d proved himself. He was just a squirt after all. But he delivered, and the money went to Greece and got converted into — what is it over there, sesterces?”
“Drachmas.”
“—drachmas, and then returned and reconverted into dollars, with everyone taking his cut down the line. The amount left would still be substantial, but hardly enough to keep an ambitious young bandit in tropical splendor for the rest of his life. The process had already taken so long he had to take out a student loan to live on.
“So he banks the squeaky new money and goes to work for Ford for nine or ten years — maybe knickknacking the accounts to feed his larcenous soul, or maybe he’d learned patience — until Timothy Marianne comes along with an investment prospect he can’t refuse. Bang, he’s in on the ground floor of Marianne Motors, and bang again, a few years later he gets made general manager. It’s a desperado’s dream.”
The waitress came and refilled my cup. Miskoupolis put a hand over his and said nothing. She left.
“I think you approached him,” I said. “Maybe even CerbCorp’s shares in Marianne stock were a gift to keep you from tipping the authorities to that old armored car job. The statute ran out a long time ago on the robbery, but Davy Jackson’s death makes it murder and that just stays there like atomic waste. This is a longshot, but maybe your demand for a cut is what started him laying off shares already owned by someone else. Maybe not. Try this: After dealing you in at gunpoint, Hendriks gets to thinking about it and realizes there’s no way you can make good on your blackmail threat without implicating yourself as an accessory after the fact. So he deals you right back out. Maybe that’s what he was doing yesterday with his computerized ledger when your mechanic marched him to that elevator and fed him two slugs.”
Fie laughed then, one of those roaring Greek-fisherman laughs that stopped every other conversation in the room. It didn’t have the hollow note I would have liked. It sounded relieved.
“Do you think I’d send a man in to kill him and not retrieve the records of our transaction?” he said, when he stopped laughing. “How long did you spend on this theory?”
“Just the time it took to serve it up. It only came to me five minutes ago.”
“I’m glad for you. It means you didn’t waste any more of your time than you have of mine. Now unless you intend to eat that, others are waiting for this booth.”
I pushed away the saucer. “It didn’t look like any contract job I ever saw. There were three holes in the back of the elevator and only two in the victim. Whoever fired the shots missed at least once, more unless both slugs went through Hendriks. I had to see what you did with it.”
“Sorry you made the trip.”
“I’m not. I can see I was right about his laundering the stolen money through you. You’re not the poker player you think you are. Too warm-blooded.”
He let that pass. “Look for your killer among the other investors. Start with the one that stood to lose the most.”
“That’ll be Stutch. That still leaves the problem of the extra holes. The firm would hire better talent.”
“Unless someone wanted to make it look like an amateur job,” Miskoupolis said. “I suppose that puts me back in the running.”
“I can’t see you being that cute.” I drained my cup. “I don’t guess you’d consider telling the police about that twenty-year-old deal. It would corroborate my client’s story. They couldn’t charge you except for the murder, and that’s so many times removed a man with your lawyers could beat it over the telephone.”
“I’d have no reason to take that risk. If it were true.”
“I had to ask.” I got up. “Thanks for seeing me. I still don’t like gangsters.”
“I’m a restaurateur.”
“You make good espresso. Save the baklava for somebody whose sweet tooth kicks in earlier than mine.”
“Don’t come back.”
I got to my favorite Woodward bar a few minutes before noon and stood smoking on the sidewalk among the class of people who stand around Sunday mornings waiting for bars to open. Some of them were dressed better. I consoled myself with the difference between ends and means. When the barkeep threw open the bolts I took the end stool and ordered a Strohs.
The keep had the TV set over the bar turned on with the volume down, warming up for the baseball game. I drank beer and tapped ash into a cheap glass tray and watched a dancing wiener cha-cha with a jar of French’s mustard. A laid-off GM worker and a junior high school track coach argued politics at the other end of the bar. When I looked at the screen again my client was on it.
It was an old front-and-profile mug from Jackson, where DeVries had spent the first part of his sentence before getting kicked up to Marquette. He was slimmer and beardless and still had his hair, but it wouldn’t make much difference. A Swede who stood six-eight and weighed 280 would be stopped for questioning that day. I told the barkeep to turn up the sound.
“... believed still at large in the Detroit metropolitan area. Police declined to say why DeVries is a suspect. Hendriks, shown here during a press conference Thursday ...”
I asked him to change channels. Two stations over they were showing black-and-white footage I hadn’t seen in years, of city blocks in flames and people bucket-brigading furniture and TV sets out of smashed shop windows and paratroopers in incongruous camouflage trading automatic fire with unseen snipers on littered streets.
“... convicted in 1967 of felony murder and conspiracy to commit armed robbery after he set fire to draw attention from ...”
On the next channel, a black woman reporter was interviewing the security guard who had held me for the police in the Detroit office of Marianne Motors, and whom DeVries had knocked down and stood on the day before that.
“... busted in here yelling for Mr. Hendriks to show himself. I wanted to call the cops then, but Mr. Piero — that’s my boss ...”
“Okay, put it back.”
“There’s what comes of turning killers loose.” The barkeep returned to the original station, where a young weatherman was calling football signals over Kansas. “I’m with Cecil Fish. Let’s get back the death penalty in Michigan.”
“Iroquois Heights prosecutors make that same noise every couple of years,” I said. “None of them’s made governor yet.”
“Well, he’s got my vote.”
“He deserves it.”
The keep leaned his big meaty face close enough to tell me he was a better customer there than I was. “What might that mean?”
“It means I need a new favorite bar.” I paid for the beer and left.
I had an acquaintance in Security at the Detroit Public Library who let me in the back way when it was closed. I found the drawers containing old issues of the News and Free Press on microfilm and clamped the ones I wanted into a machine in the reading room. I was getting to know the layout better than the warehouse district and Detroit Police Headquarters. The private eye of the future will wear spectacles with Coke-bottle lenses and carry a rubber thumb in place of a gun. He will talk in computerese and spend good drinking time browsing in the software department at Hudson’s. That’s if he’ll be needed at all, with a portable electronic brain in every household. Of course he will be. People will always need someone to stand in front of bullets and fists aimed at them.
Nineteen sixty-eight blurred past, stopping here and there at pictures of DPW crews cleaning up riot damage and young longhairs in fatigue pants with flags sewn to the seats and soldiers on the line in Vietnam with flowers in the muzzles of their M-16s and Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy campaigning and Bobby Kennedy lying on his back on a hotel floor with surprise and confusion on his face. It made me feel as old as erosion.
It took an hour longer than I’d expected. Even then I missed it the first time and had to turn back on a hunch. It claimed two inches of the city section between an interview with Mayor Cavanaugh and an illustrated advertisement for Listerine that promised an end to sore throats caused by viruses. “CITY CIRL KILLED IN AUTO MISHAP,” read the headline. I digested all it had to offer in ten seconds and turned, unenlightened, to the obituaries.
SOUWAINE, MARY FRANCES
Aged 19, died suddenly Monday, Oct. 14. Born May 11,1949, in Birmingham, Ala., daughter Harold and Mary Katherine (Joiner) Souwaine. They preceded her in death. Moved to Detroit 1967. Attended Wayne State University. Survived by a sister, Edith. No services planned. Donations in lieu of flowers to the National Highway Safety Council.
I read it through twice. Then I put back the microfilms, found some more recent ones in another drawer, and spent another hour with them. They only went back five years, but they made me feel just as old.
The little parking lot on West Grand River was as barren as a proving ground. I crossed the street on foot against no traffic at all and used my key in the front door because the super had locked up and gone home. He had stopped living on the premises after a black revolutionary had cut loose at me with a light assault rifle in the foyer. It’s a lonely sort of life but not always dull.
My building was quieter than the library, quieter even than the Detroit office of Marianne Motors with Hendriks dead in the elevator and the doors bumping him like amateur pallbearers trying to carry a coffin through a narrow doorway. The stairwell echoed and the hallway on my floor with its dingy linoleum and impertinent new suspended ceiling might have belonged to an evacuated shelter. I was alone. Even rats don’t hang around a place where there is no promise of food. The busted brokers, dirty-nailed tailors, credit dentists with Mexican degrees, chiropractors, sign painters, orange-haired cosmeticians, electrical contractors, legal experts with malfeasance suits pending, TV repairmen, palmsters, tattoo artists, carpet salesmen, escort pimps, bookies, clowns, geeks, freaks, Sikhs, mercenaries and model agencies, martial-arts instructors with greasy smocks and tattered eastern philosophies, all the floating jetsam from the higher rents downtown, were home living their lives or away trying to forget them. I felt like the last whooping crane.
A shadow fell across me while I was unlocking the door to my outer office. I knew who it was without turning around. I pushed the door open and stood clear to let him inside.