Every Brilliant Eye (15 page)

“I guess that’s what it was.” She was speaking rapidly now, getting away from it. “I’ve been living in Grand Rapids with my sister. I couldn’t stay and go on watching him lose pieces of himself.”

“He was depressed?”

“‘Despondent,’ I think, is the word. That’s what they call it after you’ve killed yourself.”

“Did he kill himself?”

She met my gaze then. “Are you investigating his death? Sergeant Grice told me they were closing it out.”

I rotated the spoon in the cup one more time and held it above the liquid, waiting for the quivering drop on the end of the bowl to fall. “The article on your husband’s retirement was among the items left behind by a man I’m looking for. There were other clippings with it, including one about a corpse found in the trunk of a car parked at Metro Airport and another about the life of Alfred Kindnagel, the Jewish labor czar, you should pardon the expression. The murdered man’s name was Philip Niles. He ran a body repair shop called Acme Collision in Royal Oak with a man named Wally Petite. Does any of these names mean anything to you?”

She shook her head. “Well, Alfred Kindnagel. I’d heard of him. On
TV
and in the papers.”

“Your husband once arrested Petite for petty theft. Caught him yanking a carburetor from a new Camaro in a supermarket parking lot. I got that from Records down at police headquarters.”

“He didn’t discuss his work with me.”

“Records also told me a union shop steward named Morris Rosenberg was shot down behind the Wenk Bearing Company on the Detroit side of Eight Mile Road a little over eight years ago. He was connected with Kindnagel’s organization. Your husband commanded the detective squad that investigated the shooting.”

“Same answer, I’m afraid,” she said. “My thought would be that when you find the man you’re looking for you’ll know what all those tilings have to do with each other.”

“I’m hoping it will work out the other way. So far, your husband is the only thing linking them. I think finding out why he killed himself would go a long way toward tying up this whole mess. If he killed himself.”

The waitress came up with the pot and I stopped talking. She leveled off Mrs. Blankenship’s cup, glanced at my full one, and glided away. Mrs. Blankenship picked up an open pack of Virginia Slims from the table and shook one out. I lit it for her. She tipped smoke down her throat.

“I thought at first Ray was having trouble adjusting to civilian life,” she said, letting it curl out from under her upper lip. “He just sat around the house, smoking cigarettes and drinking too much, though I never saw him really drunk. We started arguing about a lot of little things we’d never argued about before. All the arguments ended the same way, with the two of us screaming at each other and me getting into the car and driving away. Ten days ago I did that and didn’t come back. I just kept driving. I guess I put the gun in his hand.” She picked up her cup and drank quickly.

“Why’d he leave the department?”

“He never said. One morning he just looked at me across the breakfast table and asked how I’d feel being married to a civilian. I thought he was playing a game. You know: Do you regret not having married so-and-so? That kind of thing. But he was talking about himself.”

“What did you say?”

She smiled the bent smile. “What every woman who was ever married to a cop would say. Anyway, he didn’t bring it up again, and two weeks later he put in for his pension.”

“You didn’t ask him why?”

“I thought I knew why. You’d have to have known Ray, Mr. Walker. He was as high as he figured he could go in the system and still look at himself in the mirror. Maybe one step higher. It got so when we met someone and they asked him what he did he would change the subject. It never used to be like that. I remember when he got his gold badge. He went right out and bought a can of polish. He wasn’t going to let it turn green before he had a chance to earn it. That was a whole different Ray. I couldn’t have screamed at the Ray he was then and gone to stay with my sister. The Ray he was then wouldn’t have made me. That’s the Ray I’m wearing black for. I’m ten years too late.”

Her face clenched then, and I watched the shadows start their slow crawl across the street while she clawed a handkerchief out of the blue bag she had with her and made repairs. Then I said:

“Could something have happened that made him feel that way? That he’d climbed one step past where he needed to be to like himself?”

“I don’t know what it could be.” She snapped the bag shut and retrieved her cigarette from the tin ashtray. “I’m sorry for making like the grieving widow. I’m not crying just because he’s dead. I wonder if it’s always this much of a shock when you start surviving the people closest to you.”

“It is.”

“Oh?” She cocked her eyebrows, waiting. After a couple of seconds she put them back down and stubbed out the cigarette. “I always thought I’d be the one to beat death,” she said then. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Live.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re a young man. That graying hair doesn’t fool me.”

“No one’s young, Mrs. Blankenship. It’s an old world.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “Excuse my French, but bullshit. I had enough of that from Ray. You’re a detective. You spend all day looking at the side of rocks no one is supposed to see and then you run around hollering the whole world’s covered with slugs and green slime. Writers put it in books that win all the awards because green slime and slugs are supposed to be real and blue skies and flowers and pretty paintings are not. Bullshit.”

She wasn’t speaking loudly, but her voice carried in the small restaurant. A white-haired woman in an orange tailored suit two tables over put down her menu and slid on a pair of glasses on a chain around her neck to glare at us. I lifted my cup to the white-haired woman and drank lukewarm coffee. She took off her glasses and stuck the menu back in front of her face.

“I’m chastised,” I said.

Color scaled Mrs. Blankenship’s cheeks. “Sorry. I’ve been kind of floating since yesterday morning. Nothing’s real. I talk about things I wouldn’t otherwise.”

“I’m grateful you talked to me. Why did you?”

“I guess I thought you knew something. I’ve been asking myself why Ray did what he did. I’ve been afraid of the answer. I hoped you’d have one I could get along with. Or maybe I’m just buying an expensive coffin with solid brass handles for someone I should have been more patient with when he was alive. Oh, God.” She put a hand to her mouth.

The waitress returned, saw she was crying, and started to leave. Mrs. Blankenship asked her to stay and we ordered dinner. When it was before us, I said: “Do I have your permission to look into your husband’s death?”

“Do you need it?” Looking in her compact mirror, she used her handkerchief to remove the ruined mascara.

“Not officially. I’m licensed and I have a client. But whenever a P.I. starts rooting around in the lives and deaths of police officers he’s apt to draw lightning. Your blessing could deflect some of it. Cops place a lot of store in police widows.”

“Widow.” She tasted the word. “That takes getting used to. It draws a picture that doesn’t look like how I see myself. Yes, you have my permission.” She poked at her chicken with her fork. Then she put it down and looked at me. “Do you think Ray didn’t commit suicide?”

“I have nothing to base that on. As a general rule when a street cop like Grice says another cop killed himself you can take it as holy writ. They get pretty Old Testament when one of their own is murdered. On the other hand, I’m not satisfied that a couple of fights over who forgot to screw the cap back on the toothpaste tube and a simple case of burnout are grounds for putting your gun in your mouth.”

“Well, there were more than a couple of fights, and they were more serious than that.”

“Still.”

“My husband was an honest man, Mr. Walker.”

“It’s the honest ones that kill themselves usually,” I said.

We finished our meal and I thanked her again and asked if she needed a ride. She said no. I snatched up the check over her protests, left too much money for the service we’d gotten, and saw her out to the curb. Under a street lamp I took down her sister’s address and telephone number in Grand Rapids and promised to get in touch if anything came up about Blankenship. Then we said good-bye. I watched her walking away in the light coming through the restaurant window and from the Budweiser sign in the window of the bar next door, a tall woman and not ashamed of it, straight-backed with her high heels double-clicking on the sidewalk. I drove home. The lamps were glowing along Woodward with that slightly pinkish cast unique to Detroit. The wandering homeless would be settling into their temporary shelters now, those that had found them. Maybe some of them would be asking about Willy, but I doubted it.

The evening air was cool and dew glittered on the grass as my headlamps raked the front yard. I parked in the garage and pulled down the door and let myself into the house through the side door. Just then the telephone started to ring. I went into the living room and caught it on the third stroke.

There was a hollow silence after I said hello. Then a man’s voice, trying hard for flat and expressionless, said:

“Tough break, Walker.”

The line clicked.

I stood there holding the receiver for a while, more like a weapon of defense than an instrument of communication. Finally I replaced it. For the thousandth time that year I swore that I would learn to get along without a telephone at home.

I
FOUND MY
Free Press lying square in the middle of the front doormat next morning. The kids don’t hurl them from moving bicycles anymore, but get off and walk up to the door and lay them down as gently as puppies in a basket. I figure they’re being paid by the hour now. When I had the paper in my hand I closed the door and put away my gun.

Blankenship had made the second section.
FORMER POLICE INSPECTOR KILLS SELF.
Three inches, on an inside corner. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. They got his age wrong. I folded the paper and put it aside and used the telephone to call the Book Cadillac. While the desk was ringing Louise Starr’s room I stood back away from the windows.

“Well, hello,” she said, when I’d identified myself.

She sounded wide awake. I said, “I thought editors slept late. All that reading in bed the night before.”

“I played hooky last night, went to see the show at the Fisher Theater and retired early.”

“Alone?”

“Alone what?” she asked after a second. “Went to the theater alone or retired alone?”

“We’re coy for this early. I meant the theater.”

“Andrei took me. You know, I almost never go in New York. You just take it for granted it’s going to be good, so why go? It’s like gambling when there’s no chance of losing. But no one told me the theater was so good here.”

“We got rid of the Indians too.”

She passed that one. “Have you found Barry Stackpole?”

“Barry’s still out there in the forest somewhere. Right now I’m up to my ears in trees. I was thinking of taking the morning off, or has Andrei shown you all the sights?”

There was another little hesitation before she said, “Is that something you do often? Take time off from a case you’re working on?”

“No. I just have to step back from this one, read the whole billboard. I’m starting to feel like one of the blind men with the elephant. Also I got my life threatened again last night.”

“You talk as if it’s happened before.”

“I lead a popular life. Everyone wants it.”

“You’re not telling me you’re afraid.”

“I’m not sitting with my back to any doors, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s just that I don’t think of you as the type that scares.”

“Everyone scares, Mrs. Starr, except maybe Gary Cooper. I’m afraid of decaying hands reaching up from under my bed in the night and rats scurrying over my shoes when I take out the trash and that tingly feeling we men get standing at a public urinal when the door opens behind us. Most of all I’m afraid of lying stripped in the Wayne County Morgue with my eyes open and someone saying, ‘Yes, that’s him,’ although right now I can’t think of anyone who would bother. But if I thought any cracker with two dimes in his pocket and ten seconds to kill could dial my number and frighten me off a case I’d paint my toenails and become an exotic dancer.”

“You’d make a good one,” she said. “Are they trying to frighten you off the case?”

“I thought so last night. It’s getting interesting enough. This morning I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to shake friends off my lapels. It’s been never. Have you had breakfast?”

“No. It’s a funny thing, but I don’t seem to miss it when I’m away from home. Should we meet in the hotel dining room?”

“Hotel dining rooms are the same all over. I’ll meet you in the lobby in twenty minutes and we’ll go somewhere where they serve food.”

She said okay and we hung up. After that I lit a cigarette and thought about the connection. It had seemed good, but then we’ve come a long way in tapping lines.

I was a few minutes late, probably about the same amount of time I had spent inspecting my hood and doors and under the dash for unfamiliar wires. With a fresh shave and a suit just back from the cleaners I felt good enough to be seen in the lobby of the Book Cadillac, though I might not have before they’d covered the Petoskey stone facings on the walls with washable paneling and dropped the cupolaed ceiling. Little by little they are bringing Detroit down to the level of the people who are running it now.

She wasn’t hard to find. All you had to do was follow the glances of the men standing in business suits in the humming lobby. Today she had on a heavy silk gray-blue blouse with puffed sleeves and a blue neckpiece, also silk, loosely knotted in a bow under her collar. Her gray skirt was split as if for riding and she wore gray suede boots. Her hair was down to her shoulders and she was holding a blue purse with a silver clasp and looking at a tiny watch strapped to her wrist. She was wind in the pines, blue shadows on snow across a moonlit valley, the sudden scent of fresh flowers on a zephyr. She glanced up as I approached. Chimes rang.