Downriver by Loren D. Estleman

aboard ship. The walls were bare of pictures.
    “I bet taxes are low hereabouts,” I said.
    “Not low enough. But lower than other places.” She stepped through the screen door in back and held it for me.
    The backyard bunted up against the cyclone fence with white pickets on either side. On the square of lawn, a yellow-headed boy and girl of about four were digging holes in a sandbox and throwing the sand out onto the grass. They were twins, dressed identically in red shorts and Smurf T-shirts and barefoot. A heavy big man sat watching them in a canvas deck chair with a glass in his hand. He, too, was barefoot and wore a shirt with parrots on it and khaki shorts and one of those wide-brimmed straw hats with a green plastic eyeshade that gave his face a bilious cast. The face was wide and square and so were his hands and feet. A pitcher of ice and brown liquid stood at his elbow on a pedestal table under a striped umbrella.
    “Children, the grass,” said Mrs. Orlander.
    “Hell with the grass,” the man said. “They’re my grandkids. What about that beer?”
    “Drink your tea. You know what the doctor said.”
    “Not as good as you do, goddamn it.”
    The girl stopped digging. “Grampa said G.D.”
    “Watch your language, Floyd.”
    “Yes, Dottie.”
    “This is Mr. Walker. He wants to talk to you about something you worked on.”
    He started, took off his hat, and looked up at me. The brim had blocked his view. His hair had been red, but had faded to a rinsed-out pink, and was cropped so short he would have looked bald from a distance. He had faded blue eyes and blotched skin and one of those faces that came either with age or from both ends of a lot of beer bottles. He wasn’t that old. After a long look he hung the hat on the arm of his chair and drained his glass.
    “You’re since my time. Most of you are, I guess. Changing mayors put a lot of good men back out on the street.”
    “I’m not with the department.” I gave him one of my cards. “You worked the DeVries arson case, right?”
    “You mean the robbery.” He read the card and floated it in a puddle of iced tea on the table.
    “That’s what I wanted to talk about. He may be innocent.”
    There was a chaise longue on the other side of the table. Mrs. Orlander took a Ladies’ Home Journal off the flowered cushion, stretched out, and began turning pages. Orlander refilled his glass from the pitcher. “He after a new trial?”
    “He’s out.”
    “Then what’s the point?”
    I played it straight up. “He thinks he knows who pulled off the robbery. If he’s right he wants the money.”
    “That’s fair. If he was innocent, which he ain’t.”
    “If he isn’t it will come out. I don’t work so well with whitewash. My thinking is you could tell me lots about the robbery that isn’t on record. At the very least it might turn Davy Jackson’s killer.”
    “Who told you about that?”
    “Jackson’s parents. You don’t think DeVries killed him or you’d have charged him with first-degree murder at the time.”
    “Not charging him and not thinking he did it don’t even go to the same school.”
    “Do you think he did it?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    He poured tea into his mouth and swallowed it. “Throwing up smoke to cover a heist is an important job. The guy you give it to can’t be bothered with pulling off a hit besides. The rest of it was planned too tight. They wouldn’t make that mistake. Two guys hit the truck, Jackson and one other. The money wasn’t on Jackson so his buddy capped him during the fade and took off with it. DeVries going down meant he didn’t have to split with nobody.”
    “Wouldn’t he be worried about DeVries talking?”
    “At that particular time a black perp would of went to the chair before he’d give up another black to the white man’s po-lice.” He whined the last word like Willie Best.
    “Thin.”
    “You had to be there. You had to see it. Nothing I ever heard or read told it like it