Every Brilliant Eye (20 page)

The girl at the counter had put down her book and was watching me, sighting down the aisle between the rows of greeting cards and pantyhose. A hand-lettered sign taped to the rack read
NO LOITERING IN THE MAGAZINE SECTION
. I chose a copy of
Gentleman’s Quarterly
and brought it over to her. She looked from it to my rumpled sweater and lowslung jeans.

“It’s for my brother,” I said.

She rang it up. I paid for it and left. There was a coffee shop on the next comer, where a group of Thursday night bowlers in green silk shirts were having their own little party at a back booth. They reminded me of the guy whose parking space I’d taken at Curly’s Bar and I grabbed a booth at the opposite end of the room. A waitress brought me coffee and a doughnut. I spent the next half hour dunking and sipping and grinning at the men’s fashion ads in
GQ
. A piece on grooming had some shaving tips I could use and I read that and a profile of Jack Nicholson and then the clock over the counter said nine o’clock. I folded a dollar bill under my saucer and settled the bill at the register. Walk twenty feet in any direction in this country and there is another place to eat. At any hour there are enough griddles going to heat Greenland.

I rolled the magazine into a tube and jammed it into a city trash can, where the swarthy Italian number on the cover smiled amid crushed Styrofoam cups and wads of tissue. He reminded me of Wally Petite. Then I began walking back to Barry’s neighborhood. My knee had stiffened up some and I walked slowly to avoid limping, but not slowly enough to attract attention. I passed an elderly couple out for a stroll, the woman taking little nibbling steps with her hand on the man’s arm and his other hand on her back for support. It’s possible to do that on well-lighted streets that far north of the Renaissance City.

Even taking my time like that I pushed it a little. A uniformed cop was standing on the lawn in front of the smashed window with his hands on his hips, looking around, while his partner leaned on the roof of the cruiser, speaking into the radio mike. I turned and walked down a side street before either of them spotted me. If they collared me and looked at my ID it would be tough explaining what a Detroit P.I. was doing walking in Harper Woods after dark. After two blocks I turned again. I was heading back in the right direction when the blue-and-white rolled away up the street with its roof light off and no siren.

Just in case someone was watching I circled the house, then stepped over a low grille fence in back. The back door was dead-bolted as expected. I stood in front of a window and pulled off my sweater and jabbed straight out from the shoulder with my other forearm across my eyes. The glass caved in with less noise than the window in front had made. I hesitated, poised to run, but no sound came from inside. The police had found the turnoff switch to the burglar alarm and used it. They were peace officers, after all. I cleared away the rest of the glass and let myself in over the sill.

T
HERE IS NOTHING
quite so quiet and remote-feeling as an empty house at night. The air lay in room-size blocks and didn’t move. Where I was, moonlight reflected flatly off triangles of glass at my feet. Somewhere a section of foundation settled under the new weight with a noise like a human palm makes dragging across an inflated balloon.

I was in one of those damp-smelling unfinished chambers that get called utility rooms, although except as a place to hang a mop and stack cases of dusty empty deposit beer bottles, this one wasn’t being utilized at all. I got bored with it quickly and mounted a step that took me through a vacant doorway into a fair-size kitchen with a stove and refrigerator built into one wall and a sink and drainboard that extended into a half counter. A row of glasses stood bottomside up along the edge. I drew a finger down the side of one. A faint streak showed in the pale light.

The tiny refrigerator bulb rinsed me in blue when I opened the door. The inside was empty except for a six-pack of Molson Canadian with a bottle missing, an open package of sliced bologna with the top slice starting to curl, and a quart of milk in a cardboard carton. The freshness date had run out two days before. I sniffed at the open spout, took a swig. It hadn’t started turning yet. Well, it had only been nine days. I put it back and closed the door.

That was it for the kitchen. Moonlight threw barred patterns across the floor of the living room, where the rock I’d thrown lay in a litter of broken glass. The cops hadn’t come inside to retrieve it. Other cops who had helped themselves before calling the owners had made them wary of internal investigations. The room reflected Irene’s arid taste: scoop chairs, a sofa that could ruin the man who tried to stretch out on it, a pale rug with a stripe along the edges, set at an angle like a baseball diamond in the middle of the floor, pedestal tables with round glass tops holding up nothing. One of the framed canvases on the walls was blank except for a dot that was a little off center. When you looked again it was in the exact center. Then it wasn’t. Hours of fun. Fashion and architectural magazines were spread in a fan atop the coffee table. My finger made a streak on those too. Barry hadn’t touched them since Irene left.

The bed was made in the bedroom and the dresser contained men’s shirts and slacks and socks and underwear. I had no way of knowing if anything was missing or how much. I used my flash to examine the stuff on top, Comb, brush, loose change, some ballpoint pens. No wallet. A couple of suits hung in the closet. I went through the pockets and came up with a handkerchief and a book of matches from the Peacock’s Roost. In Barry’s case a lifetime of traveling light was a long time going away.

The bathroom was clean. No interesting drugs in the medicine cabinet. Barry didn’t use them.

I had seen most of this before, of course. But not after dark with the only light sliding in guiltily through two smashed windows and me alone in mid-felony. On the first day of sleuth school they tell you what tools you’ll need: camera, fingerprint kit, eavesdropping paraphernalia, arch supports. They never mention the latchkey, the jimmy, the well-placed heel. No room for that stuff in the display case with the blank affidavits and the FBI-approved portable lab. I had found my way around more locks than a balcony rake in the age of chastity belts. I had spent more time in other people’s homes and offices without their knowledge than a fly with a muffler. I had housemaid’s knee from climbing through windows and when a burglar alarm went off anywhere in the city I started running, like a punch-drunk prizefighter throwing left jabs every time the telephone rang. It’s funny work for an honest man.

I went into the only other room in the house. Barry’s study.

It had been a second bedroom and it still had that look, but he had moved out the bed and moved in a cheap desk and chair and a steel bookcase jammed with reference material and a wicker magazine rack to hold his file folders and hung a framed eight-by-ten blowup of an angel-faced young man nattily dressed in wide lapels and a Panama hat with a broad silk band. It was Jerry Buckley, the crusading radio commentator slain by Purple Gang killers in the lobby of the Hotel LaSalle in July 1930. The picture had kept Barry company everywhere he had lived for no matter how brief a period. I never knew if it was because he felt a kinship with another journalist who had fallen victim to the underworld or if because on later investigation, Buckley had proven as corrupt as a factory second. The Stackpole sense of humor didn’t run to anything so simple as pratfalls and seltzer.

I flipped through the folders in the magazine rack. Mob stuff, mostly tearsheets from published sources. He had crossed out a lot of the information, sometimes drawing X’s across whole pages, and added corrections in the margins in his hasty block printing. Some of these were pretty interesting, but I wasn’t learning any dangerous secrets or he wouldn’t have left the stuff out in the open. I saved my batteries for something better.

A Smith-Corona portable, out of its carrying case for maybe the first time since he had acquired it, shared the desk with a stack of blank sheets in an ocher box. There was nothing in the machine. I tried the top drawer of the desk. Locked. I sighed and broke out the picks I’d brought.

I was sitting in Barry’s chair hunched over the lock when a shaft of hard white light rammed through the window over my left shoulder.

I fought down a nearly overwhelming urge to throw myself to the floor, and froze. My shadow, black and solid, leered at me from the wall. For a long time the shaft remained motionless, lying across my shoulders and the back of my neck like a bar of white-hot steel. Then the light moved on, sliding across the wall until the window frame cut it off. The door to the living room was open and I watched the beam glide over the furnishings there. After another long interval the shaft vanished. An engine started up and purred away.

My night vision returned slowly. I looked at my watch, turning its face to the moonlight. Quarter to ten. With luck the cops wouldn’t patrol the place again this shift. But I started working faster.

The lock was all show. There was just the one keyhole, which indicated a rod affair that secured all three drawers, and those never are much. The tumblers shifted and I put away my picks and tugged out the drawer. Inside I found a divided steel tray cluttered with pencils and erasers and paperclips and jars of rubber cement. Nothing underneath the tray. The second drawer held more blank sheets and carbon paper. The bottom drawer contained a lead strongbox.

The metal’s in disrepute now. It connotes poison, which some people think is communicated by biting. But for safe places to keep things, it has it all over steel. You can pound on it with a sledgehammer and pry at it with a jimmy and it will just keep changing shape and never let you inside. But this one wasn’t locked, or even closed. The papers jammed inside wouldn’t let the lid down. I hoisted the box out of the drawer and placed it on the desk and snapped on my flash.

It was all financial stuff, pay receipts and old passbooks and check stubs. Overstuffed though the box was, it wasn’t much for the average person living in the age of Xerox and American Express. Barry owned no credit cards and had only started a checking account to keep his tax man happy, preferring to deal in cash rather than leave a trail of paper for his enemies to follow. The passbooks told me nothing, other than that the pattern and size of his withdrawals had stepped up considerably during the months Irene had been living with him. None of them was big enough to agitate my jaded mind. The deposits jibed with the sort of income a journalist with a column syndicated across the country would be making. I should have felt like a kid with his ribs exposed peering through a window at a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, but they were just numbers to me. When you get above the poverty level, everything’s in the abstract.

Most of the odd receipts were deductible expenses: typewriter repair, telephone, books for research. I riffled through the little bundle of check stubs bound with a rubber band and found more of the same and one that interested me. It was made out in the amount of three hundred sixty dollars to “Z Travel,” and dated September 23. That was the day I’d gone to the Detroit Press Club with Barry, the last day anyone had seen him. I pocketed it, went through the rest quickly the way you do when you figure you’ve found what you’re looking for, put it all back, and returned the heavy box to its drawer.

That was it for the study. I closed the drawers and flipped off the flash and went back into the living room. A low bleached cabinet stood in one corner. I tugged open the door, used my light to read some labels, and lifted a bottle of Scotch off a shelf. I uncapped and tilted it. The liquid slid down my throat and landed with a dull thud. I took another drink to cushion the blow. My mind started clearing, as from a draft of clean mountain air.

The desk was awfully neat for Barry. I hadn’t known many writers, but those I had known weren’t the tidiest people I’d met, and even the tidy ones left clutter. There wasn’t a scrap of writing in the study. Someone, probably Barry, had been through the place with a new broom. I drank again. My mind was getting clearer by the minute. I screwed the cap back on and put away the bottle and went back into the study.

The wastebasket was green plastic and tucked away in the kneehole of the desk. I untucked it, upended it. Baseball-size crumples of paper cascaded out and bounced all over the bare floor. I tossed away the empty wastebasket and sat on the floor to inspect my booty.

The first three pages I uncrumpled and turned this way and that in the moonlight were blank. It seemed a waste of paper. I saw Barry sitting and staring at a sheet in the machine just so long before he yanked it out and balled it up and tossed it, just to be doing something. He would go on that way until there were words on one of them. The fourth had a piece of a paragraph starting about a third of the way down the page. In the upper right-hand corner he had typed “Steel/Lead, I.”

The doctor’s name is Willard. He is a tall man with a tan and a rumbling bass and gray curling hair at his temples, the rest of it chestnut. He asks me how I am, and there is just the right amount of concern in his tone. He says he has brought

The passage ended there. I laid the wrinkled page aside and picked up another crumple, smoothed it out on the floor.

The doctor’s name is Willard. He is tall and tan with chestnut hair curling and going gray at the temples. He asks how I am, and there is just the right amount of concern in his rumbling bass. He says he has brought something for me. He places it on my lap and hinges back the cover and I am looking at a book of noses.

I straightened out another ball of paper.

... and I am looking at a book of noses. Hopes and Barrymores, Durantes and Eckstines, pugs and roman hooks, they are all there in front view and profile, a mug book of probosci. My puzzlement must show through the chinks in my bandages, for Dr. Willard says, “We don’t often have as much leeway as we have in this case. The extent of the damage to your face calls for substantial restructuring, and as the taxidermist said when the poacher brought him an eagle he blasted with a shotgun, ‘How do you want it, duck or eagle? I can go either way.’” And he chuckles.