Every Brilliant Eye (21 page)

That finished the page. I rooted around until I found page 2.

Using old photographs, Dr. Willard rebuilds my face along the old lines and when at last the bandages come off he places a mirror in my good hand and I look and say that he has done a wonderful job, which he has. Not a scar is visible. But the face is not mine, more like a close relative’s. Little things have changed, and I know that it will take some getting used to. I

The rest of that one was blank. I dropped it and went through the others, looking for the thread. All I found were pieces of what I’d already read and something else, a close mass of single-spaced lines smudged on a torn sheet without a number or identification.

I wear a Judas face but I am Cain. Cain ably killed Abel in a canefield and trod to Nod to find a wife and a new life without strife. Instead he lost his face and even Abel wouldn’t know the face he placed in its place. No tied-off blood vessels or gray cooked flesh stuck to the sheets for Cain, the swain. Just new sheet metal work and fresh trim and a coat of paint, a Detroit makeover for the man who burned the candy man. Candy Cain.

It was nutty stuff, a college freshman’s idea of stream-of-consciousness. It didn’t sound like Barry at all, but it had been typed on the same machine as the other stuff. I got up and rolled one of the blank sheets into the portable on the desk and pecked out something original about a quick brown fox, then unrolled it and compared it to what I had just read. It was the right machine, all right. I figured he was drunk when he wrote it. They say that a complete personality change is one of the signs of alcoholism. They say a lot of crazy things that don’t hold up outside the laboratory where they torture monkeys and white mice. I folded both sheets and put them in different pockets and scooped the remaining crumples back into the wastebasket and parked it under the desk. Then I let myself out of the house through the back window.

I walked back downtown and used a pay telephone to call the operator and ask her to report a fresh disturbance at Barry’s address to the police. This time maybe they’d put an officer in front until morning and keep some opportunist from getting inside the way I had, someone whose moral character was not as high as mine. I hung up while the operator was asking my name, then used the quarter that had come back to dial Louise’s room at the Book Cadillac and tell her I’d be late and to meet me in the hotel dining room. She said okay and didn’t ask any questions.

There wasn’t much chance of catching a cab cruising Harper Woods at that hour, so I started walking west. My knee was good. Cool air touched my face like a hand carved out of ice. That’s when I realized I was sweating.

T
HE DINING ROOM
at the hotel was one of those places where a waiter named Armand, snowy hair and crepe soles, sets the little silver-plated coffee pot down at your elbow and ghosts in every five minutes to empty the ashtray. There wasn’t much business in the place late on a Thursday night and he was all ours. He was going to be disappointed by my tip. Dessert was a cold pink cloud in a stemmed glass with whipped cream and half a strawberry on top. I finished mine, Louise ate her strawberry, and we went out to hail a cab. We weren’t going anywhere, just riding around.

“Why, this is a beautiful city.” She watched the lights sliding past the windows like colored glass on a black satin lampshade.

“At night,” I agreed. “And depending on where you are in it.”

“What’s that blinking light?” She pointed.

“Broadcast tower on top of the Fisher Building.”

“It looks like a landmark.”

“The Lone Ranger was born there, the Green Hornet too.”

“It is a landmark.”

“Was. WJR’s moving.”

“Into some flat dull box, I suppose. Like the churches they build now.”

“Steeples have no resale value.” I pointed south, where a spidery span strung with colored lights seemed to hang in space. “That’s the Ambassador Bridge. Windsor on the other side.”

“Isn’t that the wrong direction for Canada to be in?”

“There’s a little neck of it down there hiding out from the Queen.”

She sat back. Light from the street lamps along Michigan fluttered across a shimmery off-white thing to her ankles. A light shawl draped her bare shoulders and she had on a silver band around her neck, so thin it showed only when the light struck it. Her hair was up. I’d cleaned up and shaved and put on a suit before meeting her and I was just barely adequate. “You like living here, don’t you?”

“You can get used to being stuck in the eye with a finger if that’s how you wake up every morning,” I said. “Yeah, I like it.”

I told the driver to take us along the river and we jogged over onto Jefferson and turned east. The lights from Windsor scalloped the choppy surface. Ahead and to the right, the glittering canisters of the Renaissance Center seemed to be turning with the play of light like huge interlocking gears. The place had all the sinister beauty of a stiletto with a jeweled handle. If you had an infrared scope you could look out through any of its windows and witness two crimes of violence per night.

“You haven’t told me what made you late,” Louise said then. “I’ve been wonderfully patient.”

I reached up and slid shut the safety shield between the front and back seats. The driver’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, then back to the road. I lowered my voice to a murmur.

“It takes time to burgle a house.”

She picked up on it quicker than expected. “Barry Stackpole’s?”

“Yeah. He’s started a new book.”

“Did you bring it out with you?”

“I didn’t see it. Just a couple of rough opening pages I found in the wastebasket in his study. It has the same title as the Vietnam book, only this one’s not about Vietnam. I don’t think.”

“What’s it about?”

“It doesn’t matter. It won’t tell me where he is. I found something else that might, a record of a payment to a travel agency. I’ll check into it tomorrow.”

“Is there something wrong with your leg?”

I had shifted positions a couple of times. The cab wasn’t a Checker and there wasn’t room to straighten the knee. “I hit it with Fenkell Street this afternoon.”

“This has something to do with what happened to your car, hasn’t it? Were you in an accident?”

“I wrecked it. I wasn’t in an accident.”

She crossed her legs and propped her chin up on her elbow, looking at me. The shawl slipped three inches. “Are you being a confidential character again?”

I met her lavender gaze. “I bet the young Shakespeares clap their hands and bark like seals when you do that. Show them a creamy shoulder like alabaster under a Cairo moon.”

“Damn thing’s always down around my ankles.” She adjusted the shawl.

“Better,” I said. “Someone monkeyed with my steering and brakes. I aimed for the softest and cheapest thing I could find and took the air.”

“My God.”

I made a shrug. “I should get a new car out of it. The
News
will be happy to pick up the tab when they find out I trashed a
USA Today
box with the old one.”

“Did you talk to the police?”

“No.”

“May one ask why not?”

“One may.”

“I see,” she said after a moment. “We’re in the hero business this week.”

I said, “I’ve wrecked cars before. I’ve been hit over the head and pumped full of drugs and jailed and shot and worked over with brass knuckles and lied to a lot. Maybe I will be again, though I really hope not because my head’s not as hard as it used to be. Certainly I’ll be lied to again. But if I start running to the cops, getting my name in the papers with theirs, I’m on the street. My livelihood depends on a profile no higher than curb level.”

“You talk as if private investigators don’t have rights like everyone else.”

“We surrender them when we sign the license application form. It’s part of the ceremony.”

“This has something to do with the warning you got last night?”

“I hope so. Any other answer would be too complicated.”

“You scare me.”

“Not you.”

“Yes, me. I’m not half as tough as I like to make out. There’s a whole universe between facing down a fat publisher who hasn’t read a book since
Black Beauty
and dealing with people who kill people, actually kill people. I couldn’t exist in your world.”

“Nobody asked you to.”

We had passed the RenCen by this time and were heading northeast, where the river broadened and the foreign skyline disappeared behind the long dark bulk of Belle Isle in the middle. The street lamps were spaced out farther now. The intervals of darkness between them were longer. She rested a hand on my sore knee. “Coming back to the hotel? I’ll put some ice on this.”

“Run that gauntlet of clerks, hops, and dicks?”

“They’re grown up.”

“All the way up to blackmail.”

“We could go back to your place.”

I laid my hand atop hers. She smiled. I patted it.

“A funny thing happens to a man when he passes thirty,” I said. “He finds out he can live without a warm body next to him in bed. It changes his whole outlook.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean Freud was only a little bit right. It can be the driving force in your life, but only after lunch. Preferably on an expense account from the publisher.”

Her hand jerked, but I hung on. “What’s your point?” she demanded, and the warmth in the air was gone. Only the scent of jasmine remained, like incense in an empty room.

“The book’s not mine to sell, princess,” I said. “Not for money, and especially not for sex. Tomorrow you’d be flying back home with a best seller in your briefcase and I’d just have sheets to change.”

“That’s disgusting!” Her nails were claws.

“No argument.” I let go.

She said, “You wouldn’t know an honest emotion if it bit you.”

“Most of them do.”

“You’re a suspicious, vile man. You think everyone else has an angle and you’re the only character with any sort of integrity. But someone had to pay you to look for your own friend.”

I closed a hand on her bare arm, high up where it can hurt. “It’s a business, lady,” I said quietly. “Just like yours. A title without any clout, a card that only opens doors when I slide it between the tongue and the jamb. When I have a legitimate client the cops don’t stand on my foot so hard. And the missing persons business takes money, lady, money to get lost and money to get found. Clients have money. It isn’t at all like opening your thighs to keep a job.”

She said, “You’re hurting my arm.”

I released it. “Don’t pay any attention to me. My knee’s throbbing.”

“Please take me back to my hotel.”

I pushed back the safety shield and told the driver. We watched the scenery on the way back. A jet angled in low overhead on its way to Metro Airport, its blinking lights describing a neon cross. It reminded me of a case I’d had once and I thought of an old lady in black living in St. Clair Shores. The old ladies in black were dying out, giving way to sinewy hags with hair bottled in blonde and leathery brown skin burned dry by the sun and that hungry look behind their dark glasses when the beach boys glide past in their tight G-strings. Age didn’t matter anymore. Everyone was stuck in gear. The sexual revolution had ended but the refugees hung on.

Louise got out while the cab was still in motion and started across the sidewalk. I told the driver to wait and caught up with her at the door and touched her arm, gently this time. “I wasn’t calling you what you think.”

The lavender was gone from her eyes They were splinters of blue ice. Very low she said something to me that didn’t come from her part of New York, not during the day anyhow.

A character in a burgundy uniform with gold braid on one shoulder and scrambled eggs on his cap pried himself loose from the door and said, “The lady doesn’t look like she wants your company, sir.”

“You ought to put some nail polish on all that trim,” I told him. “The glare’s blocking your vision.”

“What’s that?”

“The gentleman just insulted me,” Louise explained.

When she spoke, he looked at her with just the right measure of sappiness to go with a guy who would let his boss dress him like a wedding cake, and when he looked back at me the sides of his jaw stuck out in lumps.

I started to laugh then, and got back into the cab. As we pulled away, the doorman was holding the door for Louise.

A block farther on we passed a little girl hugging herself in a short skirt and knee-length boots in a doorway on the corner. By this hour she would have been in and out of the outfit five times. At night the smog over the city turned to clouds of stale perfume. If the place had a welcome sign it would read “Over Forty Billion Serviced.” What they charged, fifty bucks or a book on the
Times
list, had nothing to do with the basic nature of the transaction. We’ve established what you are, lady. Now we’re haggling over price.

On my way home it occurred to me that I hadn’t told Louise the real reason I hadn’t called the police yet. I didn’t half buy it myself.

I
WAS TOO WIRED
to sleep. I stayed up past three reading Barry’s typescript, some parts of it for the third or fourth time, and staring at the single-spaced paragraph I had found in his wastebasket, waiting for the axe to fall. It didn’t, and when the type started running together I put everything away and went to bed. I may have slept. An hour ahead of the clock I got up, wide awake, and went to the office. The bus was almost empty at that hour.

A note on my desk informed me the building cleaning service had been in. It was the only thing on the desk that didn’t have dust on it. I turned the Venetian blinds up and down. I decided they looked less grimy. Then I decided they didn’t. My finger left tracks on the tops of the file cabinet and safe. Finally I opened the deep drawer of the desk and lifted out the office bottle. They had cleaned two inches off the top.

The mail wasn’t in yet. I put away the bottle and sat down and squirmed around until I’d fitted myself into the groove I’d worn in the seat. That killed a few seconds. I chain-smoked two cigarettes, which killed ten minutes more. By then it was time to call my answering service.