Read Online Downriver by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online Page A

yeller anytime.
    “I’m a private investigator working for Richard DeVries. Maybe you remember the name.”
    “I meet a lot of people. You’d better give me a hint. A quick one.”
    “Twenty years ago, during the riots. You’d remember him. He’s a whole lot bigger than a breadbox.”
    “Sorry, Walker. I was in England at the time of the riots, studying at Cambridge on the exchange program.”
    “He says it was Wayne State.”
    “I was at Wayne State for a year. The wrong year for the riots. I took my accounting degree from Michigan.”
    “Law, he said.”
    “Perish the thought. Your Mr. DeSoto is mistaken, Walker. Don’t bother me again.”
    I listened to the dial tone for a moment, then cradled the receiver. Rubbed my rigid neck.
    He shouldn’t have said DeSoto. Either you remember a simple name like DeVries or you plain forget it. You don’t get it wrong unless you try. Or maybe you do. There are just no rules for that sort of thing, only a grumbling in the guts, and I had that.
    I decided to let it grumble for a while and got out my pocket notebook where I’d scratched down the information DeVries had fed me about Davy Jackson’s family. If any of the slain armored car robber’s relatives were still in the area and had a telephone I’d find them in the directory. The ex-convict was right about one thing: Twenty years isn’t enough time to go from the smell of cooked cabbage in the hallway to an unlisted number. Not in that place, and not without a gun.
    Davy’s parents’ names were Cleveland J. and Emmaline Jackson. They were together the last DeVries knew, but his knowledge had been left standing in a jar for two decades. There were no entries under either name, but I made a list of Jacksons with the initial C. or E. and one C. J. and started dialing. I got two no-answers, a busy signal, a man with a Tennessee drawl as thick as Graceland who had a cousin named Davy alive and kicking down Murfreesboro way, and two offers not to be alone Saturday night. One of them was from a man named Calvin.
    I tried the busy line again. It belonged to C. J. Jackson.
    “You get ’er straightened out?”
    A man’s voice, very slow and scratchy, like a wornout tape. I said, “Get who straightened out?”
    “Ain’t you fambly service?”
    “Not today.”
    “Hell. I been all morning trying to scare up a pair of crutches for the wife. Dog-damn computer never heard of us, and we been with Welfare since ’sixty-two. Sure you ain’t fambly service?”
    “Sorry.”
    “Hell. You think we was fixing to sell them crutches and run off to Mexico.”
    “Are you Cleveland J. Jackson?”
    “Who wants him?”
    “Was Davy Jackson your son?”
    In the quiet on his end I heard the electronic laughter of a TV situation comedy rerun turned down low. “You a reporter?”
    “No.”
    “ ’Cause one called here once, said he was doing a piece on the riots. Said he wanted to talk to the relatives of all the victims that was still living in Detroit. I told him to go do it up a rope. He went ahead and wrote the story anyway. You do that I’ll kill you. I got a gun.”
    “My name’s Walker. Richard DeVries hired me to investigate the robbery.”
    “He in jail.”
    “He’s out.”
    “Dog-damn.”
    I couldn’t read him. He would have had years of practice at not being read. I said, “He says he didn’t do it. He wants me to find the ones who did.”
    “Them ’Guards seen him fire that place.”
    “He admits to that. It’s the robbery he wants me to find out about.” I waited. The droid audience on his TV was becoming hysterical. I asked him finally if I could come out and talk.
    “Our boy Davy was no good,” he said. “I done told his mother but she didn’t hear it. He dead, what I want to talk about him for?”
    “I think if you didn’t want to we wouldn’t still be talking now.”
    “I ain’t got the time. I got this crutch thing to chew over.”
    I lined up my notebook with the edges of the desk blotter.