Every Brilliant Eye (22 page)

They didn’t have anything for me. I hung up and smoked another cigarette. Then I called for the time. My watch was a minute and a half slow. I reset it, and there went two more minutes. This was going to be a snap.

When it was coming up on eight o’clock I opened the Yellow Pages to Travel Agencies and paged to the Z’s. The pickings were lean in Greater Detroit. A display for Zodiac Vacations, Inc., took up a quarter of the page, complete with map, special holiday hours, and a row of smiling faces with the agents’ names printed underneath. It listed two locations. Next to it Zephyr Travel ran a more modest notice the size of a calling card, just its name in elegant script and a number in Grosse Pointe.

I didn’t see the third one until I moved my thumb. It was a one-line entry: “R. Zeitgeist, trvl agnt.” A telephone number and a Fort Street address followed.

That was it for the Z’s. Zodiac, with its main office on Forest, was the closest. I wet my cab whistle and left.

It was one of those mellow gold fall mornings. The wind had a nip in it and the air was sharp with burning leaves and fermenting cider. Where a tree grew out of a box on the sidewalk and its leaves hadn’t gone the way of industrial toxication, those leaves were turning brown and russet and umber and red. It was a morning to ditch the office and go looking for a football game, any football game. I hoped someone was doing just that for me.

Zodiac occupied a storefront on the north side of West Forest near the John Lodge, a large communal office with a suspended ceiling and two rows of walnut veneer desks with a broad green-carpeted aisle running between. A standing rack near the door held colorful brochures and the walls were papered with posters of matadors and hula girls and Times Square lit up like V-J Day and couples walking along deserted stretches of immaculate beach. All the desks were manned. I chose a vacant seat in front of a man in his late twenties balancing a telephone receiver in the hollow of his shoulder while pattering away on the keyboard of a computer terminal on a revolving base next to the wall. The nameplate on the desk read
DAVE
, no last name.

“I don’t recommend that hotel,” the young man was saying into the telephone. “Sure, the rates are the best in New York, but we got complaints of rooms getting ripped off and the customers think it’s personnel. Yeah. Okay, can I get back to you? Thanks.”

“I worked in a couple of hotels,” I said, when he’d hung up. “I wouldn’t recommend any of them.”

The corners of an impressive handlebar moustache turned up jauntily and he relaxed in his chair. He was wearing a plaid shirt and skinny tie under a corduroy jacket with ornamental patches on the elbows. “Hotel people are mostly scum, the upper levels anyway. They know there’s an eighty percent chance they’ll never see you again and so they gouge you. I rate them down around morticians and sidewalk solicitors. Where can I send you today?”

“My wife says she wants to see some color. Do you arrange tours of the north country?”

“Sure, but you can hop in the car and take off up 23. You don’t need me.”

“You must own the place,” I said.

“No, I just don’t believe in picking pockets. I figure my days in the travel business are numbered.”

“You’re the man I want to talk to, then. Barry said to be sure and look up Dave.”

“Barry?”

“Barry Stackpole. He’s on a trip he said you set up.”

He turned his chair and thumbed through a stack of scribbled sheets on a spindle, hesitated, then finished the job and turned back, smoothing his moustache with a knuckle. “No Stackpole. You’re sure he said Zodiac?”

“I’m not even sure he said Dave. But it sounded like that and the place he used had a name that started with a Z.”

“There must be several in this area.”

“There are three.”

He ran a thumb along the veneer of the desk. “What is it you want? You’re not interested in any fall color tours. I don’t even think you have a wife.”

“I’m an investigator.” I gave him one of my cards. “Stackpole’s come into an inheritance and he has till the end of the month to come forward, otherwise it goes to the government. We found a reference to ‘Z Travel’ in his records and we thought maybe you were the agency that got him out of town. We need a location or a number where he can be reached.”

“What was that story about the tour?”

“A blind. In cases like this where money is involved, our informants tend to want to cut themselves in.”

He grinned. A lad with a cookie-duster like his can really build you a grin. “I guess you’re not going to tell me what it really is. That inheritance story is older than that poster of Hawaii.”

“Force of habit.” I grinned back. “Stackpole’s got an appointment with a grand jury. If he doesn’t show up it’s going to start costing his employers. The money thing works the other way too. The smell of green ink loosens a lot of tongues.”

“Is there money?”

“If the information’s good.”

“Makes me wish I knew something. If your boy used Zodiac he didn’t go through me.”

“He might have used an alias.” I described him. Dave shook his head. I said, “What about the other agents?”

“I’m managing the office while the regular guy’s in Aruba. I have to okay all checks and I didn’t see any signed Barry Stackpole. Unless he has an account under another name?”

“Who said he paid by check?”

“Everyone does. If someone came in here with cash, one of the girls would ask to see two pieces of identification before she’d accept it.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s not hiding under any of the desks,” he said. “There’s hardly room for our knees there.”

“How about your other office?”

“It’s just a telephone and a place to drop mail. No agent there.”

I got up and tapped the card on the desk with a finger. “You can reach me here if things change. Maybe you can send me on a trip I don’t go on and give you back the ticket to cash.”

“Hell being an honest man,” he said. “Have to go clear around the Horn to make a little change.”

“Choice you make.”

“Nobody makes the choice to be honest, pal.”

“Just testing.”

He smiled under the thatch.

Next I tried R. Zeitgeist on Fort Street near the post office. The first cabbie I got wouldn’t even take me to that neighborhood. The second kept his eyes moving and his hand between the front seat cushions while I counted out the fare. He took off with a cheep of rubber as soon as I slammed the door. A couple of cabs had been shot at in the vicinity earlier in the year.

The ground floor of the building sold auto parts. The counter was just six feet in from the door, with a painted partition behind it with another door cut into it. The real stuff would be stored in back. You went up to the counter and asked for a water pump for a ‘78 Mustang and if they didn’t have one in stock they would back-order it from a parking garage six blocks over, preferably after dark,

There was no building directory inside the stairway entrance from the street. From the looks of the entrance I was lucky there were stairs. On the second floor I found the elephants’ graveyard for the ninety percent of small businesses that fail within the first two years: credit dentists, disbarred attorneys, auto insurance agencies for the accident prone, easy loan companies, palmists, and karate schools. The rubber-paved hallway smelled of stale hope.

I found the same legend I had read in the telephone book lettered in flaking black on a frosted glass panel with brown grime hammocked in the corners. When I opened the door it bumped against the desk on the other side. The whole place was no bigger than a linen closet and had no windows, but the walls were covered with overlapping posters, orange island sunsets and blue oceanscapes with yellow moons hanging over them. One of the yellow moons was wearing a face with six chins.

The face had a body and the body was jammed into a pink shirt and a green sport coat that gave up where a pair of huge furry wrists began. Two points of a yellow bow tie with red squares on it poked out from under the chins.

While I was staring at this arrangement, the telephone on the desk rang and the moon face stirred and a broad pink palm came up in a holding gesture to me while its mate lifted the receiver to a surprisingly small and well-shaped ear. The other hand came down and picked up a freshly sharpened pencil from a row of them on the blotter and began scribbling on the pad.

“Yeah. Got it. No, I can’t repeat it now. Yeah.” The receiver went back to its cradle. A pair of tiny black eyes looked at me without blinking.

“R. Zeitgeist?” I asked.

“What it says on the door.”

His voice was high and shallow, like a boy’s. I got out of the way of the door enough to shut it. He didn’t ask me to sit down. There wasn’t anything to sit down on. I was giving him the line about setting up a fall color tour when the telephone rang again and the palm came up. He used the next pencil in line.

“Okay, got it.” He cradled the receiver, put down the pencil next to the one he’d used first, saw me turning my head to read what he’d written, and moved his hand over it.

This time I finished what I’d started to say and he said, “Color won’t be reaching its peak up north before next weekend. Try me in a week.”

“Barry Stackpole told me to look you up.”

He caught the telephone in mid-ring, picking up another pencil at the same time. “I can’t give you that now,” he told the mouthpiece. “Five minutes.” Hanging up: “I don’t know any Stackpoles. You got the wrong agency.”

Before I could answer he was on the horn again. I skinned two twenties out of my wallet and tucked one end under the blotter.

When he finished talking he scooped up the pencils he’d used and fed them one by one into a sharpener mounted on the desk, cranking the handle noisily between a meaty thumb and forefinger. He blew the shavings off the point of the last one, sighted down its length, then reversed ends and used the eraser to push the currency back in my direction.

“Don’t let the location throw you, Jim,” he said. “I keep a roll of bills bigger than these in the toilet.”

“Bet they get used when a twenty-to-one longshot comes in at Hazel Park.”

His face turned a darker shade of yellow and his chins started to work. The bell jangled again. I picked up my money and let myself out while he was writing. If Barry was going to book a trip, he wouldn’t do it through the road show version of
Guys and Dolls
.

Zephyr Travel was a dish of another order. The building was a colonial mansion built by one of the more obscure auto magnates during the First World War, all white with a shake roof and a balcony running clear around, supported by enough square columns to hold up three more of the same size. Its many windows looked out on a tide of cool green lawn that would make a golf course look shabby, bordered on either side by a line of cedars trimmed into perfect cones. The place had no sign. My driver checked the number on the gatepost and we glided up a broad composition driveway and braked in front of a porch that made the one on the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island look like a tenement stoop. Ours was the only vehicle in sight. I paid the driver and said he could go.

“Maybe I wait.” He snicked up the flag on the meter. “You don’t look like someone that’s going to be in there long.”

I went right in without knocking. That’s one ceremony cathedrals don’t stand on. The room I found myself in was a cozy acre, surrounded by windows with thick maroon drapes drawn shut and illuminated by sunlight streaming down through a skylight toward the rear onto a glossy brown floor, where it glimmered like moonlight on calm water. In the center of all this emptiness stood a French desk, all top and curving legs bleached white and then tinted mauve. The extra pair of curving legs under it belonged to a sleek operation in a blue dress with white lace trim around a heart-shaped neckline. Pearls above that, and higher up a gaunt model’s face with black hair all around, lots of it. As I approached, my footsteps chuckling in the rafters, she slid a red leather bookmark into a volume that would be Dante in the original or something like that and set it aside.

“Zephyr Travel?” I asked.

“Yes?” Her dark eyes gave up the barest flicker over my J.C. Penney suit.

“I had to make sure. There’s no sign.”

“We don’t advertise,” she said. “Our clients come to us on recommendation.”

“You have a display in the Yellow Pages.”

“Colonel Wheelock, that’s the owner, owns stock in Michigan Bell. He calls it priming the pump.”

“He in?”

“Have you an appointment?”

“I need an appointment to arrange a vacation?”

“You need a reference to make an appointment,” she said. “Maybe we aren’t the agency for you. We charter jets and around-the-world cruises and arrange safaris in Africa.”

“I might consider renting an elephant.”

“Twelve is the minimum.” She rested her chin on a red-nailed hand.

“They come in sets?”

“Maybe if you told me what you have in mind I could recommend someone.”

I handed her a card. “I’m looking for a man named Barry Stackpole. He’s a columnist with the Detroit
News
. He recorded a check for three hundred and sixty dollars to a Z Travel shortly before he came up missing. We thought that might be you.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“Sleuth’s plural. To make you think I’ve got a whole organization behind me. I don’t get as many doors put in my face when I use it.”

“It wasn’t us. Three hundred and sixty dollars wouldn’t get you out that door.”

While she was talking, a gaunt old man came out of the sun-washed section behind her leaning on an ebony cane and laid some papers on the desk. He had a straight back under a tan suit pinched at the waist, crisp white hair against a complexion the shade of walnut, and the general appearance of someone who was used to coming in out of the sun.

“These are fine, Diane. Get them off today, will you?” His clipped British accent held a hint of command.

“You didn’t have to bring them out, Colonel,” she said. “Why didn’t you buzz?”

“I once hiked three miles through enemy lines with a dead sergeant on my back, although I didn’t know he was dead at the time. I think I can handle this.” A pair of faded blue eyes jerked my way and he stood a little straighter, if that was possible. “Sir?”