I WAS A ROBOT in the Marianne plant, high-tech as all hell and I didn’t care who knew it. At the moment I was engaged in trying to weld Frances Souwaine’s face back together. I wasn’t making much progress, but that didn’t faze me because emotions weren’t a design feature. The bell rang, ending the shift. I lay there a while before I realized it was the telephone. I swung my feet to the floor — human feet, with sore arches — and sat in darkness, wondering where I was. Then I dug the empty Scotch bottle out of my back and remembered. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa in my living room.
The telephone kept ringing. As I lifted the receiver, the antique clock struck two.
“Walker?” The thin old voice had crack to spare. It was the beginning of his two-hour working day.
“Here, Commodore.”
“Raf gave me your message a few minutes ago. I need details.”
I gave him some. The whole thing had happened less than twelve hours ago and they were still sharp. There was complete silence on his end and for the third time in our acquaintance I wondered if he was dead.
Not dead, he said: “I must have those computer disks. Name your price.”
“I gave them to the police.”
“That was foolish.”
“It was that or jail on more charges than even you could afford to listen to over the telephone. The cops downriver take a dim view of Detroiters coming down committing trespass, assault and battery, borderline impersonation of police officers, and illegal discharge of a firearm inside city limits. The cops up here take just as dim a view of withholding evidence and harboring a fugitive. I split the disks up between the two departments. They can fight it out without me.”
“The company can declare bankruptcy and settle the claims for fifty million or so,” he said, thinking aloud. “As chairman of the board Marianne will have to answer fraud charges in his general manager’s absence. He can beat those. We’ll pull something out of this yet.”
“Marianne’s got other worries. Last I heard they were still working on removing that bullet from his brain.”
“I called the hospital. He’s out of surgery and in intensive care. Generally speaking, if you survive the operation under those conditions you’re already ahead of the odds. If nothing vital was destroyed he has a chance.”
“He won’t want it.”
“What of the officer, what’s his name, Orlander?”
“The bullet transfixed his side. They pinned his ribs together at General and sewed him up. He’ll be released in the morning. His wife and daughter and son-in-law and their two kids were coming into the building when I left. Generally speaking, if you survive visits from loved ones under those conditions you’re already ahead of the odds. Mrs. Marianne died more or less instantly,” I added, “ the pain and shock stopped her heart.”
“What about your client?”
Richard DeVries and I had parted company downriver, where the cops were holding him before turning him over to Detroit. Floyd Orlander and Chester, Marianne’s foreman, had agreed to provide statements corroborating mine on the subject of Frances Souwaine’s confession. The whole process would take forty-eight hours and then DeVries would be free.
I told him I’d take my fee for five days and expenses out of his retainer and send the rest to him at the Alamo. I’d asked him if he still wanted the two hundred thousand. He stroked his short beard.
“Yeah.”
“Get in line.”
“I’m used to it.” He shook my hand. There was nothing more anyone could teach him about that.
“He’ll be fine,” I told Commodore Stutch. “When the story gets out he’ll be up to even his neck in lawyers wanting to sue the state for damages in his behalf.”
“He was better off among thieves and killers.” His tone changed. “Thank you, Walker. I’ll send Gerald to your office tomorrow with a fee for your services.”
“Have him mail it. I’m heading north tomorrow to pick up my car.”
“Would you like a brand new Stiletto? It will be a collector’s item in a few months.”
“I’d just see Mrs. Marianne lying inside every time I looked at it.”
He said good-bye and we hung up. Two weeks later Leland Stutch, aged one hundred years, three months, and twenty-seven days, died in his sleep. At that he outlived Timothy Marianne, who expired at fifty-two after ten days in a coma. The News ran a spread the following Sunday on the history of the automobile industry in Detroit from Stutch to Marianne. It didn’t sound like either of them and it made me wonder about all the others.
Superior looked flinty under a low overcast, the waves pointy and sharp-edged like the shattered rocks on the beach. Three ore carriers sat low and black in a line on the horizon, resembling silhouettes on a navy chart. Tiny long-legged birds stilt-walked in and out of the tide looking for whatever the lake had served up. The air had a fresh metallic chill.
I dropped the Renault where I had rented it and walked three blocks to the garage where my Chevy was supposed to be ready. It was out being test-driven. I drank unspeakable coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and read a display of fan belts until it returned. I wrote out a check for six hundred and change, put away the receipt for the insurance company, and drove from there to sheriff’s department headquarters. The inside of the car smelled like an aquarium with ammonia added.
Major R. E. Axhorn was sitting in a captain’s swivel behind a gray steel desk in an office with his name on the door. He looked big and solid in his buff-and-brown uniform with his black hair going gray, and out of place with a ballpoint pen in his hand. He recognized me right away. “See Henderson in Fraud if you got a complaint about the garage,” he said.
“No complaint. I thought you might want to know what it was you had a piece of last week.”
“That big convict with you?”
“Ex-convict. I left him in Detroit.”
He pointed the butt end of his pen at the open door. I closed it. The hinges squeaked.
“First time it’s been shut since they promoted me,” he said. “Suppose you start in with how you wound up in the lake.”
I took a seat in an upright chair with a steel frame and told the story again. I gave him what I’d given the cops and what I’d given the Commodore, and in the giving realized it was the first time I’d told it all the way through without holding anything back. He sat rocking his chair back and forth on its snivel with his hands resting on the arms, looking like a chief hearing the terms of a treaty. When I was finished I lit a Winston and drew in smoke to fill the emptiness the story left behind.
“Figure this St. Charles fellow has shot his wad, do you?” he asked.
“They all have. Him, DeVries, Orlander, Davy Jackson’s parents. Even Frances Souwaine came off tired after killing Hendriks and telling about it. It’s one reason we were able to get around her. Poison builds up only so long and then it’s got to find an outlet.”
“Trouble is it don’t leave you feeling no better afterwards.”
“The shrinks don’t think so.”
“The shrinks don’t know anything about anything. If they did they wouldn’t be committing suicide twice as often as cops. Comes a point where the poison’s the only fuel you got. Blow it off and die.”
“How are the Wakelys?”
“Lurleen dropped her kid Saturday. A boy. Looks a little like Burt and Hank both. Whoever’s sitting here sixteen years from now’s going to know him pretty good. Hank just bailed Burt out of County after Burt broke a window and two fingers in the Gitchee Goomee Saturday night. Celebrating their new cousin. Hank paid cash. I expect a B-and-E report on this desk by next weekend.”
“Seems the only difference between what you do up here and what the cops do where I come from is you don’t have to ask for names.”
“Only when the summer people are up.” He watched me, his eyes black in their dark copper setting. “You fish?”
“It’s been years.”
“We ought to go down the Seney some Sunday. They tell me the salmon downriver’s big as dolphins this year.”
“Is there ever a year they don’t say that?”
“I don’t guess there is.”
“Maybe next trip.”
“Yeah.” He rocked back and forth. “We never will, will we?”
“Never’s a long time.”
“Too bad. A man finds his soul fishing. Appreciate you coming in. Walker. You didn’t have to.”
“Sure I did.”
We shook hands and I left. I didn’t see him again. The next time I got up there, several months later on a wandering husband job that went sour in St. Ignace, a young sheriff’s lieutenant told me Bob Axhorn had left the department. I wanted to ask if he’d gone fishing. I didn’t.