Downriver Page 2

  “So far you’re an arsonist who pulled the kind of sentence arsonists don’t usually get and should. I’m having trouble identifying, even with your check in my pocket.”

  “The neighborhood was evacuated. Maybe I’d of burned a cat, except cats never let themselves get trapped. I ain’t saying it wasn’t stupid. Didn’t you never want to burn nothing down?”

  I lit a cigarette off the dash lighter and blew the smoke out the window. “I had a pretty good plan for burning down my junior high school. I didn’t like my gym teacher and the principal had it in for me. That’s as far as I got, the plan.”

  “Maybe with a sore back and a bellyful of cheap wine you would of got farther.”

  “Probably not. But I’ve never been black in a white world.”

  “I wasn’t out to hurt nobody, black nor white. I didn’t rob no place and I didn’t shoot no guard and it wasn’t me got Davy killed.”

  “Was Davy in the car?”

  “Just the white dude and his dirty girlfriend. I can still smell her. I never seen Davy till they was showing pictures of his body in court. You got to realize where my head was. I didn’t know half of what was going on and I wasn’t feeling too clean on account of starting the fire and I never made the connection between Andrew or Albert and the robbery. By the time I did I had bars on my face. I wrote letters. Nobody wrote back. They had their pigeon.”

  “What’s in the library?”

  “Let’s go in and find out.”

  The place smelled of books and oiled wood and time in a jar. Sunlight tiled the floor in gold patches and the old rosewood whimpered under DeVries’s size fifteens. At that time of day we were alone with a woman in a salmon-colored suit and a gray silk scarf seated behind the information desk. She wore her black hair short and her eyes gray. She was about thirty and looked better than the job called for. When we stopped in front of her desk she looked up from her writing — and up. The desk came to DeVries’s knees.

  “It’s a woman,” he said.

  “What’d you expect?” I asked. “There are more male librarians than there used to be, but you’ve still only got two possibilities.”

  “I mean it’s a woman. I thought they was all married to other cons and kept behind glass.”

  “May I help you?” She shifted her attention to me. It wasn’t as far to yell.

  I said, “Excuse my friend. He just mustered out of the French Foreign Legion. He carried the camels when they got tired.”

  “I see.” And looking at him again, she did. Living in a prison town they get so they can spot them. Something like sympathy worked under her features. It didn’t work too hard. When they smoothed over again DeVries said, “October fifteenth, 1984.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I want the Detroit News for October fifteenth, 1984. You got it?”

  “That would be on microfilm. In there.” She pointed at a door.

  I thanked her and steered the big man through it. Three of the viewers stood on a library table and the walls were lined waist-high with dated file drawers. July to December 1984 was near the floor.

  “She was wearing perfume,” he said. “Did you smell it?”

  “More likely cologne. Library boards haven’t bent that far.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “About fifteen dollars.” I took out a box labeled oct. 84 and we went to the table. He watched me clamp the spool of film in place and thread it through the machine. “I miss the big books.”

  “Wait till you see what they’ve done to typewriters,” I said. “Say when.”

  The light projected the transparencies onto the viewing screen at the bottom of the machine. I turned the crank and we watched the days blur past. It fascinated him. They hadn’t gone that quickly for him the first time.

  “There! Go back.”

  I reversed the crank. The page we’d just passed slid back into frame. I sharpened the focus. There were several columns on the Tigers, boiling over from the sports section in the wake of the big Series victory. I wondered how the game with Baltimore was going.

  “That’s him. Albert or Andrew. I memorized the date. They didn’t let us keep clippings in the cells.”

  His pointing hand obliterated most of the page. He withdrew it. The photograph had nothing to do with baseball. It showed Timothy Marianne, the former Ford Motor Company vice president in charge of engineering and design, signing a labor contract on a desk surrounded by his staff and representatives of the United Auto Workers. The caption said it was his first official act as owner-director of Marianne Motors. Since then his angular, black-browed features and thinning gray hair had become as familiar to Detroiters as the Penobscot Building.

  “Timothy Marianne wasn’t in college twenty years ago,” I said. “He would have been in his mid-thirties even then.”

  “Not him. The one standing on his left. You don’t forget a face like that.”

  He was right. Feature writers made a lot of Marianne’s rugged good looks, but the man pictured leaning over his left shoulder in a pinstripe suit and paisley tie was someone to look at twice in a crowded elevator. His hair was black and long for an executive, combed straight back from a modest pompadour behind his ears to his collar. He had high cheekbones and light eyes and a straight nose and lips that curved like a girl’s. That fresh look would stay with him well into his thirties and already had, if he was who DeVries said he was.

  I said, “It’s a place to start. I wouldn’t hope too hard. He isn’t identified. We don’t know if he belongs to Marianne or the union or if he’s still with either of them.”

  “I figure we can get a line on him at his old apartment house on Twelfth. Maybe the landlord can tell us his name or where he went from there.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “How come?”

  “The building isn’t there anymore. Neither is Twelfth Street. They bulldozed that section and renamed the whole thing years ago.”

  3

  DEVRIES DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING after that. I rewound the film and put it back in the box and took it into the main room, where I gave the librarian the date and page number and asked for a printout. She got up with it and went through another door, moving crisply and silently on low heels. I wondered if during the job interview they made them walk up and down and assigned points according to how much noise they didn’t make. While we were waiting I asked DeVries how he was holding up.

  “I’m cool. I feel like someone changed the sheets on me is all.”

  “A lot’s different. Cars and movie screens are smaller. Girls are women, when they aren’t persons. There are as many telephone companies as telephones. Movie stars are politicians, politicians are doing guest shots on TV. Cigarettes and cholesterol are out. Computers and carbohydrates are in. When a woman you don’t know approaches you in a bar it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s in business. That’s for starters. About the only thing that’s slowed down is records.”

  “I know about all that. I read.”

  “Reading it and seeing it,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  She returned with the printout — a grainy reproduction of the Marianne picture — and I paid for it and she put it in a manila envelope for us. The sympathy had gone from her face, leaving cool untouchability in its wash. Back in the car I turned on the radio. The game had finished. I had to wait for the announcer to dispose of all the other scores in both leagues before learning that Detroit had dropped it with two errors and a base on balls in the ninth. I flipped the knob. “Where to?”

  “Detroit. I got an appointment with my parole officer Friday.”

  “Today’s Wednesday. They don’t give you much rope.”

  “What’s rope?”

  The way to US-41 took us along a broad, sun-sloshed main stem with fresh pavement ruled in bright yellow. It was lined with clean store windows and parking meters against the buildings to clear the curbs for the plows that removed twelve-foot drifts in the winter. A few tourists were out pus
hing the season in tank tops and shorts and blue knees and elbows. Hope and pneumonia spring eternal in the breasts of Michiganians.

  We were four hundred miles from home as the crow flies, if it flew across the Great Lakes. Our route was considerably less direct and half again longer. The Upper Peninsula, which belongs geographically to Wisconsin, was Andrew Jackson’s left-handed gift to Lansing in return for surrendering Toledo to Ohio. There had been some hollering about it at the time because a port on Lake Erie was worth twice as much as a rocky wilderness, but Ohio had more voters. Then the lumber industry started up and copper and iron were discovered in abundance and the hollering stopped. The war with our neighboring state goes on, however. There’s no sense in wasting a good hate.

  Two miles outside Marquette we passed through Harvey — two blocks of boarded-over storefronts and depressed tourist trade — and turned away from the lake. DeVries never looked back at it. The road opened up and so did I. The only other vehicle in sight was a dot of color in the rearview mirror.

  “Marquette’s for incorrigibles,” I said. “What’d you do that made you too hot to hold in Jackson?”

  “Cut my hand.” His domed profile was sharp against the evergreens striping past his window.

  “That shouldn’t have done it.”

  “I cut it on a guard’s front teeth.”

  “Bad move. They use angry young men for warm-up exercise inside.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “I’ve been in jail a time or two. It’s the same neighborhood.”

  “You was just visiting. I lived there.”

  I said nothing. He tipped his head back against the padded rest.

  “I feel like shit. I thought I’d be happy when I got out.”

  “That’s normal.”

  “There was guys inside didn’t want to leave. One of them had to be dragged out when his time was up. I never figured that to happen to me.”

  “Freedom’s scary. You’ll get used to it.”

  It was his turn to say nothing. The dot of color in the mirror had become an old maroon Dodge truck with a plank for a front bumper. It was making good time for the amount of smoke it was laying down behind it. The driver must have put in oil as often as he filled the tank.

  “There’s something to be said for knowing tomorrow’s going to be just like today and yesterday,” I said. “We’re all looking for that. Living on the edge is too hard on the heart.”

  “It’s noisy out here. That’s the first thing I noticed. You don’t know quiet till you been on the block. Some nights you can hear the hopes drop.”

  The truck flashed its lights. I let up on the accelerator and crowded the shoulder to give it room. It swept past with a swish and a click and a clattering of lifters. Smoke tangled around us.

  “Guess I got out just in time,” DeVries said. “My ears are institutionalized.”

  “Hang on.”

  Sixty yards ahead the truck swung into a sliding turn across both lanes, rubber scraping the pavement like nails on steel and gushing black smoke into the gray. It hinged up on its inside wheels, hung there for an instant, and came back down bouncing. By then I was already turning in the opposite direction. My tires wailed and the rear end came around with a snap that sounded and felt as if the car had bent in the middle. DeVries’s palm smacked the windshield. When the nose was pointing back the way we’d come I squashed the pedal to the floor. The front wheels spun, grabbed, and lashed us ahead. The steering wheel yanked my arms straight.

  The third vehicle, a new black Monte Carlo that had been exposed for the first time when the truck pulled out to pass, was turning, but I’d reacted too fast for the driver and he had only one lane blocked when I tore around in front of him, slinging two wheels up the grassy bank. Just then the fuel injector cut in with a deep gulp; the inertia broke the catch that held my seat in place and it slid back in its track and from then on I was reaching with all four limbs to maintain control from the back seat.

  “Hell’s going on?” DeVries was gripping his door handle.

  I couldn’t answer and drive like an idiot at the same time. In the mirror the Monte Carlo had engineered its turn into a U and was coming on. From the amount of smoke I saw behind it, the truck was following suit. Harvey flashed past like a subliminal commercial and then I had a turn coming up and a sign advising me to slow down to thirty-five. The sign wobbled in my seventy-mile-an-hour wake.

  I felt the wheels leave the road and knew the instant when they decided not to come back. Gravel sprayed, grass swished, and then we were hurtling down a grade with nothing in front of us but blue Superior.

  4

  IT WAS ONE of those county sheriff’s departments with brass hats and military titles and enough gold braid to hogtie a Democrat. We drew a major.

  Not that he acknowledged the title, engraved on a brass bar on his chest along with the name R. E. AXHORN. He was a big Ojibway with iron gray in his short black hair and black eyes in a broad pitted face the color of old blood, wearing a brown leather jacket over a buff-and-brown uniform and a revolver with a cherrywood grip in a holster behind his right hip. He shook my hand and then DeVries’s and took a seat in the wing-backed chair facing the sofa we were sitting on, leaning forward to keep his weight off the gun.

  The living room was in back of a rock shop belonging to an old man named Coulee who had waded in up to his hips to help tie a rope to my rear bumper and the other end around a tree to keep the car above water until the wrecker came. DeVries and I had managed to rescue the big man’s overnight bag and my valise containing changes of clothes and now we were wearing them, growing warm and drowsy in the heat of a small woodstove, our hands wrapped around two man-size porcelain mugs full of steaming coffee laced with bourbon. The coldest winter I’d ever spent was twenty minutes in Lake Superior in late spring.

  We were alone with Axhorn and a Corporal Hale, six feet and a hundred and forty pounds of elbows and Adam’s apple in a neat uniform, smoking a cigarette at a window overlooking the lake. Coulee was in the shop polishing the largest collection of Petoskey stone north of—well, Petoskey. He had gone up to Eagle River from his home in Dowagiac before the Depression to mine copper, moved to Harvey after the market bottomed out, and hadn’t been off the peninsula in sixty years. He had told us all this while we were diving for Chevies.

  For a minute Axhorn sat without speaking, bent forward with his elbows on his thighs, circling the brim of his Stetson through his fingers Gary Cooper fashion. Then he looked up at me from under his brows. “You told Corporal Hale you were run off the road?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I lost it on the curve while we were being chased.”

  “Sure it was a chase?”

  “Not if you don’t want one.”

  He stopped circling his hatbrim. “What might that mean?”

  “I saw what looked like a trap closing and reversed ends and got out of there. They turned around and followed, scratching up asphalt. Could be both drivers remembered something they’d left behind at the same moment and were in the same hurry to go back and get it. Could be they were in so much of a hurry they both kept going after we went into the water. It doesn’t have to be that they heard Hale’s siren and rabbited. If the paperwork’s easier that way we won’t yell.”

  After a space he said, “Which one of you is the convict?”

  “Ex,” DeVries said. “Ex-convict.”

  Axhorn went on looking at me. “That makes you the private eye. I figured.”

  “What might that mean?”

  “On TV the big-city eye is always breaking down in some hick county with a crooked sheriff that wants to see the eye on his way. City cops are always clean, it’s the counties got their fingers in some pie. Some do, I guess. If you watch enough TV ou think they all do.”

  “Sorry, Major. I guess you didn’t pick out all that brass.”

  “Yeah.” He glanced down at his nameplate. “County work’s hell. The higher you get the more metal they
hang on you and the closer you are to unemployment every time a new sheriff gets elected. Either of you grab a license plate number?”

  I shook my head. “The truck was smoking too much and we never saw the back of the Monte Carlo.”

  “Describe the truck.”

  “A maroon Dodge beater with a board mounted up front in place of a bumper. Needs new rings bad.”

  “That’s Burt Wakely’s rig,” Hale said.

  “Who’s Burt Wakely?” I asked.

  “Burt and his brother Hank are old customers at County.” Axhorn studied his hatband. “This don’t sound like anything they’d get tangled in, though. They’ll get drunk and bust up a place or take somebody’s car for a spin without exactly asking for it, but road piracy’s outside their specialty, or was last I heard. If you’ll sign a complaint we’ll bring them in for a talk.”

  “They the kind that talks?”

  “In a bar maybe. Not to the law.”

  “Forget it then. What about the Monte Carlo? Black, this year’s model?”

  “Probably a transient. The year-rounds in this county like to eat. You can’t do that and own a fifteen-thousand-dollar automobile up here. The summer people, maybe. You might have noticed it isn’t summer.”

  “I noticed.” I inhaled some whiskey fumes and felt the amber glow spreading through me.

  “Maybe you got some idea why Burt Wakely might want to turn hijacker.”

  I met his polished ebony gaze. “No.”

  “Your friend don’t talk much.”

  DeVries said, “Where I come from you don’t talk till someone talks to you.”

  Axhorn looked at him. “What’s a convict — ex-convict, excuse me all to hell — want with the company of a private cop two hours after he’s released? I never been, but if I was to make a list of the people I’d care to spend time with straight off the block, that one wouldn’t make the first fifty.”

  “I been in twenty years. Somebody has to show me around.”

  The Indian waited for more. His profile belonged on a penny. The telephone rang then on the stand next to his chair. He waited politely for Coulee to come in and answer it, then picked it up on the fourth ring.