shoot-out in Judge Lorenzo’s court. It’s not my business.”
“Was I really trying to hit him?”
“That’s the question.”
“That little pimp. You know what he’s doing now? Handling palimony suits for celebrity fags. I should of took aim.”
“I appreciate your time,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah. Good-bye.”
Mrs. Orlander started to get up, but I said I knew the way out. She showed me her dentures. Whatever she’d overheard was nothing on what she’d been hearing for decades. As I turned toward the house, a wrestling match started up in the sandbox. Orlander said if it didn’t stop right now he’d twist some heads off. The boy laughed.
14
I T WAS THE DAMNEDEST case, and knowing where to find the man I had been paid to look for was no help. It was like one of those game shows where they give you the answer and you have to come up with the question. I took the Edsel Ford eastbound into Detroit, eating cool air coming in through the windows and listening to the not-so-distant sound of Richard DeVries’s twenty-year fuse burning low. It sounded just like a big black jet waiting its turn at the runway in Floyd Orlander’s backyard.
Exiting the expressway, I found myself pointed south and kept going. That way lay knowledge. Most of what little I knew about the case had revealed itself while I was moving in that direction. It was a deal more tidy than sacrificing farm animals.
Downriver is a mystical name to most Detroiters, as the New World was to Europeans in the sixteenth century; a place where dragons drank the blood of mariners and pretty women sat in their underwear on rocks, plucking at lyres and waiting for ships to sail too close. Geographically it refers to a collection of bedroom communities strung out south of the city on the U.S. side of the international border, factory towns with dirty air and clean streets protected by lamps and the cyclops eye of the Neighborhood Watch. Some of the communities have French names to remind their neighbor to the north of the explorers who brought the world to the bend in the river that the Indians called the Crooked Way. But it’s a wasted effort, because the city is barely aware of its satellites, and everything it doesn’t understand it calls downriver.
Civilized gray smoke was leaning from the stacks of the old tractor plant-turned high tech automotive center when I swung through the opening in the chainlink fence. No guard appeared, so I rolled on until I found a space in the dozens of rows of parked vehicles with security stickers on their windshields and got out. The pavement was spongy in the late-afternoon heat and made little smacking sounds when I lifted my feet.
A red-painted fire door bore the legend AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in yellow stencil. I pulled it open. Inside, a guard in a gray uniform looked up from the sandwich he was eating behind a library table. A fan with a white plastic housing blew hard-boiled egg odor at me.
“Security badge,” he said, spitting bits of egg-white. He was a hard-looking number with graying hair and black eyebrows and a neck like a pork butt. His revolver rode high on his hip with its black rubber grip showing above the table.
I let him see my ID. “Mr. Piero in the Detroit office said to use his name.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“He gives out his name like I give out hundred-dollar bills. Offices or plant?”
“Offices.”
He reached into a corrugated box full of colored Lucite tags on the table and held out a blue one. “Hang that on your pocket and take the elevator down the hall. No detours.”
It was stamped with a large white numeral twelve. I clipped it to my handkerchief pocket and followed a narrow hallway covered in painted corkboard to a single elevator. There were no buttons for individual floors inside, just UP and DOWN . When the doors opened to let me out I made room for a brunette in a peach-colored business suit, who glanced at my tag.
“I used to be a thirteen,” I said.
She
“Was I really trying to hit him?”
“That’s the question.”
“That little pimp. You know what he’s doing now? Handling palimony suits for celebrity fags. I should of took aim.”
“I appreciate your time,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah. Good-bye.”
Mrs. Orlander started to get up, but I said I knew the way out. She showed me her dentures. Whatever she’d overheard was nothing on what she’d been hearing for decades. As I turned toward the house, a wrestling match started up in the sandbox. Orlander said if it didn’t stop right now he’d twist some heads off. The boy laughed.
14
I T WAS THE DAMNEDEST case, and knowing where to find the man I had been paid to look for was no help. It was like one of those game shows where they give you the answer and you have to come up with the question. I took the Edsel Ford eastbound into Detroit, eating cool air coming in through the windows and listening to the not-so-distant sound of Richard DeVries’s twenty-year fuse burning low. It sounded just like a big black jet waiting its turn at the runway in Floyd Orlander’s backyard.
Exiting the expressway, I found myself pointed south and kept going. That way lay knowledge. Most of what little I knew about the case had revealed itself while I was moving in that direction. It was a deal more tidy than sacrificing farm animals.
Downriver is a mystical name to most Detroiters, as the New World was to Europeans in the sixteenth century; a place where dragons drank the blood of mariners and pretty women sat in their underwear on rocks, plucking at lyres and waiting for ships to sail too close. Geographically it refers to a collection of bedroom communities strung out south of the city on the U.S. side of the international border, factory towns with dirty air and clean streets protected by lamps and the cyclops eye of the Neighborhood Watch. Some of the communities have French names to remind their neighbor to the north of the explorers who brought the world to the bend in the river that the Indians called the Crooked Way. But it’s a wasted effort, because the city is barely aware of its satellites, and everything it doesn’t understand it calls downriver.
Civilized gray smoke was leaning from the stacks of the old tractor plant-turned high tech automotive center when I swung through the opening in the chainlink fence. No guard appeared, so I rolled on until I found a space in the dozens of rows of parked vehicles with security stickers on their windshields and got out. The pavement was spongy in the late-afternoon heat and made little smacking sounds when I lifted my feet.
A red-painted fire door bore the legend AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in yellow stencil. I pulled it open. Inside, a guard in a gray uniform looked up from the sandwich he was eating behind a library table. A fan with a white plastic housing blew hard-boiled egg odor at me.
“Security badge,” he said, spitting bits of egg-white. He was a hard-looking number with graying hair and black eyebrows and a neck like a pork butt. His revolver rode high on his hip with its black rubber grip showing above the table.
I let him see my ID. “Mr. Piero in the Detroit office said to use his name.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“He gives out his name like I give out hundred-dollar bills. Offices or plant?”
“Offices.”
He reached into a corrugated box full of colored Lucite tags on the table and held out a blue one. “Hang that on your pocket and take the elevator down the hall. No detours.”
It was stamped with a large white numeral twelve. I clipped it to my handkerchief pocket and followed a narrow hallway covered in painted corkboard to a single elevator. There were no buttons for individual floors inside, just UP and DOWN . When the doors opened to let me out I made room for a brunette in a peach-colored business suit, who glanced at my tag.
“I used to be a thirteen,” I said.
She
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