Every Brilliant Eye (26 page)

He watched me go and I walked outside past Helen the receptionist, who glanced up but didn’t catch my eye, and I rode the elevator down to the lobby without stopping. The sun was behind a cloud when I climbed into the Buick. The seat felt cool.

I started the engine and drove but I didn’t go home or to the office. I was too restless for that. Instead I cruised up Woodward for most of its length, past the sleazy bars and topless bars and workingmen’s bars and family bars and cocktail bars downtown, past the Detroit Public Library and the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Wayne State University campus, over the Edsel Ford Freeway and past Shaw College and Northern High School and Cathedral Central High School and through Highland Park and along the edge of Palmer Park, where doctors and executives on long lunch hours dotted the greens in loud golf clothes, hitting balls and talking mergers and capital gains. Past the Michigan State Fairgrounds with the tents down now and the animal pens collapsed and in storage, the long Quonset building and rutted brown earth closed off like a concentration camp inside a wire mesh fence. Through Ferndale and Pleasant Ridge and between Huntington Woods and Royal Oak. Beyond them to Birmingham and then Bloomfield Hills, the silver-spoon twins, department stores and good restaurants and well-lighted bookshops and brick houses on side streets with lawns and gaslights out front and an afternoon literary society to every block, pools in back where the guests sat around in bathing suits sipping vodka gimlets and talking about the crime in Detroit and not swimming. After that I began to smell Iroquois Heights, so I detoured left and took Telegraph Road back down.

Twice I passed bright flashers—red for state, blue for city—where cops had intercepted motorists cutting in and out of traffic or turning at no-turn intersections. It was rush hour and the hunting was good. The town that put the world on wheels was the same town that had hung the first traffic light to make a profit off it. Freud was wrong, all right. It was the angle that drove mankind, the angle and what it would bring.

I didn’t have one. That made me a pervert, but perverts don’t care what they are. I stopped for gas and called Louise Starr from the station.

W
E WENT SOMEWHERE
for dinner and ended up back at her room at the Book Cadillac. It had a lowered ceiling and new furniture and carpet, but underneath that lurked the slight mustiness that all old hotels have no matter how elegant, a faint olfactory collage of cigarette smoke and leather suitcases and overnight sex. We sat in comfortable chairs, drinking the drinks room service had brought—a highball for her, a whiskey sour for me—and listening to something soft and unidentifiable drifting out of the radio attachment to the television set. Twelve stories down, traffic swished and horns honked.

“So you quit,” Louise said, cradling her glass in her lap.

She had on a pale gown that buttoned at the shoulder and fell open just above the knees, with red shoes and a matching purse she had laid on the bureau. Ruby barrettes kept her hair behind her ears.

“I quit working for Walgren and Rooney.”

She looked at me. “Is that some kind of qualifier?”

“I don’t know what a qualifier is.”

“Yes, you do.”

While I was sitting there thinking, the radio station changed its format and a singing group came on, one of those that hire piano-movers to kick them between the legs when their voices drop. I went over and found the Windsor station that plays old dance tunes and stood near the window watching headlamps winking between buildings blocks away.

“I’m going to go on looking for Barry,” I said, turning back. “In my own way, at my own pace, with nobody watching over my shoulder.”

“He won’t appreciate it.”

“Jumpers don’t thank you for pulling them off ledges. That doesn’t mean you should keep on walking.”

“Is he suicidal?”

“He got drunk one night and talked about it, but I don’t think he’s the kind to do it, not directly, anyway. Did you ever see a picture with Frank Sinatra and Doris Day called
Young at Heart
?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Was it a musical?”

“There was music in it, not the kind where everyone on the street joins in and knows all the words and dance steps. It was kind of a classy soap, with Sinatra marrying Doris and convincing himself he’s not good enough for her. Anyway, he’s driving through this heavy snow and brooding on it. Finally he just reaches down and turns off his wipers. The snow keeps piling up and blocking the windshield and he lowers his foot on the gas pedal and waits to slam into something.”

“Is he killed?”

“No, the movie had a sappy happy ending with Doris and Frank reconciling in his hospital room. The point is he didn’t set out to commit suicide, just removed all the stumbling blocks and let whatever was going to happen happen.”

“And you think Barry’s doing that.”

“Probably not with even that much intent. He has a strong sense of survival from having had to exercise it so much. Maybe he’s just testing it and leaving the results to fate. It explains why he got himself involved in a hot case, then vanished, but not without leaving a trail for the wolves to follow.”

“Why would he set himself up to be killed, even subconsciously?”

“The Old Testament ethic, maybe. I think he thinks he killed someone.”

She set her drink on the lamp table between the chairs. “Who?”

“Someone you wouldn’t know, a long time ago. It’s in his book.”

“The one about Vietnam? What’s one killing among a hundred thousand?”

“Nothing, then. A dozen years later, something. It takes that long for that kind of hangover to wear off. I’m guessing. I guess a lot. Six times out of ten I guess right. It’s a thing you pick up in the business, like flat feet.”

“Your feet aren’t flat,” she said.

It was there in her tone. I drank. “I don’t feel like being seduced tonight. If it’s okay.”

“I see.” The temperature in the room fell off two degrees.

“No, you don’t. If you did you wouldn’t say you did. The kind of guy that likes to keep box scores could do very well in this line. I get offers from clients and informants and housewives and runaways. A good P.I. with a normal libido and no more scruples than you could poke with a sharp stick could while away his whole career in bed. But he wouldn’t get a chance at a woman like you.

“It’s not that I don’t know what I’m turning down,” I said. “It’s that men get tired too. We just don’t admit it as often.”

“I do see. Also it’s easier to turn down when you’ve had it once already.”

I put away the rest of my whiskey sour and set the glass on top of the television set. “I knew I was just wasting oxygen. I had to try.”

The music went on. The station was playing a transcription of a remote broadcast from the ballroom of a hotel in Chicago that was a parking, garage by now. The ancient recording made the announcer sound as if he were speaking through a paper tube. Louise peeled off her shoes and tucked her feet up under her in the chair. She said, “I don’t know why I’m still here. I finished my work with Andrei yesterday. By all rights I should have caught a plane to New York this morning. I think it’s you.”

“It’s not me.”

“Why couldn’t it be?”

“I’m an unsuccessful man in an obsolete profession. You’re a book editor.”

“An unsuccessful one.”

“There aren’t any unsuccessful book editors. You don’t keep up your average you get traded, like a big-league ballplayer. No one calls them unsuccessful as long as they’re still playing. Under ordinary circumstances we wouldn’t even know each other. If we passed each other on Broadway you wouldn’t look at me more than once.”

“Nothing lasts.”

“If it does it can’t, because the more time you have the sooner you realize it wasn’t anything to begin with. Aw, hell.”

The dead band had hurled itself into one of those jam sessions that keep starting up again just when you think they’re getting ready to stop, like a dripping faucet. I turned off the radio and went to the door.

Louise uncoiled herself and came over on silent stockinged feet. Standing toe-to-toe with me without heels, she just came to the tip of my nose Jasmine rode the air silkily. “Drive me to the airport tomorrow?”

“I better not. The car would be too empty on the drive back.”

“This is it, then?” She touched the corner of my lips with a pink nail.

“Nothing was it from the start. Weren’t you listening?”

“Kiss me?”

I took some time brushing loose hairs away from her forehead, and then we touched lips. Hers tasted faintly of wild berries. We pressed foreheads. With her arms resting around my neck she sighed. Her eyes were lowered. She spoke in a hoarse whisper.

“When you find Barry, tell him we’ll pay an advance of fifty thousand for his book.”

I laughed until the door closed between us.

The weather turned brisk overnight. In the morning I got up shivering, closed the window on a sill white with frost, and broke out my blue regurgitated wool suit. The weatherman on the radio—meteorologist, excuse me—had a high of fifty degrees for us. I made six pancakes and charred a dozen link sausages for breakfast and had three cups of black coffee you could stand a shovel in. If everything worked out it was going to be a long day and I didn’t know when I’d be sitting down to my next meal.

I put on a hat for the first time in weeks and walked out the door at half-past seven, into the teeth of a woody breeze that stiffened my face and made the seat crackle when I slid under the steering wheel. The engine turned over a couple of times before starting. I waited for it to warm up before letting out the clutch. I hadn’t thought to ask Schinder if he’d winterized the car.

I didn’t go to the office. It was Saturday. Travel agencies were open but not investigation firms, not this one anyhow. I took Woodward up to McNichols and swung west. Light Mackinaws and knit caps were starting to appear near the schoolyards. Fallen leaves jumped and skidded along the sidewalks like grasshoppers on linoleum. It was early October and if this kept up we could expect snow by Halloween.

Zodiac Travel kept its west side office in a fairly new building between Livernois and Wyoming, with a small paved parking lot behind. I walked around to the front door and read the building directory and went past the elevators to the fire stairs. On the third floor I passed some darkened glass doors belonging to a couple of bailbondsmen and a bone specialist and knocked on a lighted one with the signs of the Zodiac stenciled in a circle on the glass. When no one answered I tried the knob. It turned freely. “Uh-oh,” I said.

The door opened noiselessly into a big square room with a row of windows along the back and bright green plants spilling out of redwood buckets lining the broad ledge inside. The ubiquitous posters made the same old promises on the walls and a stereo in a walnut console like a deep coffin played “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” at a volume just above breathing. There was a desk with a plastic wood-grain top and a chromium frame and behind the desk a pair of bicycle wheels showed.

I wasn’t armed. I didn’t need to be. A bathroom with an extra-wide doorway stood open to the left of the desk and from where I was standing I could see all of it and my reflection in the mirror over the sink. I was as alone as alone can get.

I crossed to the desk and looked at the man in the wheelchair. The back rested on the floor and his feet, encased in brown heelless moccasins, were braced against the stainless steel footrest. He wore a striped shortsleeved shirt with a red plastic penholder in the pocket containing three ballpoint pens and the shirt was tucked inside a pair of unfaded brushed cotton blue jeans. No socks. He was lean and freckled and wore his reddish hair over his ears to his collar. The freckles were misleading; he was my age. The blue hole in his left temple looked too small to have done so much damage. But a hole in the head doesn’t have to be big. All it has to be is a hole.

I walked around the desk on china legs. There was no need to feel for a pulse but I did that. His flesh was cool but his muscles hadn’t begun to stiffen. I frisked him and found a set of GM keys in his left pants pocket and a worn brown leather wallet on his hip containing some cash, a set of business cards, two credit cards, and a driver’s license, the license and the cards all bearing the name Edward Sunburn. I smeared everything between my palms and put it back.

The desk came next. The top was pretty clean: a couple of printout trip itineraries, some odd travel pamphlets, a stack of scribbled telephone messages on a spindle. I leafed through those quickly, not expecting to find anything. I wasn’t disappointed. There was just one drawer, a long one pulled out a little. I used my handkerchief to pull it out a few more inches. Desk stuff. The drawer was lined with green blotter paper with an oval stain along the edge. I rubbed it with two fingers and sniffed them. An oily smell.

A steel folding chair stood parallel to the desk on the customer’s side. I sat in it and practiced my fast-draw with a stiffened index finger. It could have happened that way. It could have happened any one of a dozen others. There are just too many directions to go in a real murder, if murder was what it was.

I got up and wandered around the office. I looked in the planters. I looked in the foot of space between the stereo and the corner of the room. I got down on my hands and knees next to the body and peered under the kneehole of the desk. Then I turned my head the other way and spotted the slim curved silhouette of a High Standard .22 magnum pocket pistol lying in shadow under the base of the overturned wheelchair.

I left it where it was and sat down on the floor. I put myself in the wheelchair and put a bullet in my brain with my left hand and fell over backwards, dropping the gun between my legs where it would bounce once on the carpet and come to rest under the chair. I lifted Sunburn’s left hand and sniffed. Maybe I smelled something burnt, maybe I had it on my mind. A carbon test would find the proper crystals embedded in the skin, I was sure of that.

It was neat as hell, as neat as any self-killing a tired homicide investigator could hope to find. Sunburn was left-handed; he kept his car keys in that pocket. It would be the hand he would use to put a hole in his left temple. Ballistics would fire the gun and match the bullet to the one in his brain. Maybe they would match it to the ones in the bodies of Morris Rosenberg and Philip Niles, but I doubted that. Cops hate easy jobs.