Every Brilliant Eye (11 page)

“It’s not all an act, though, is it? You’re really that way.”

I lit up and sat down in the easy chair, said nothing. She got the hint.

“Someone called my office a few days ago and spoke to my assistant,” she began. “I was in a meeting at the time, but when I learned who it was I called him right back. He was writing a book and he wondered if we’d be interested in publishing it. He said you’d given him my name.”

I uncrossed my legs. “Barry Stackpole?”

“He’s syndicated across the country. A book with his name on it carries a guaranteed sale of fifty thousand. His biography alone—Vietnam, the attempt on his life that crippled him, his personal enmity with known gangsters—would assure it a sale to a major book club. I want that book, Mr. Walker.”

“So buy it.”

“That’s the problem. I told him to send me what he had and we’d talk contract. Right after I hung up I realized I’d been foolishly cautious. I should have had an agreement drawn up then and there, sight unseen. Like all dying enterprises, the book business is getting highly competitive.

There was no telling how many other publishers he was talking to.

“I tried to call him back, but he’d left or he wasn’t answering his phone. I’ve tried several times since with no luck. Someone at the
News
told me he was on a leave of absence. This morning I rented a car at the airport and bought a map and drove out to his house. It’s locked and his lawn needs mowing. I thought maybe you’d know where I could get in touch with him.” She leaned forward a little with her hands in her lap. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

“What day did he call?”

She thought. “I was with the board that day. Monday. Late Monday afternoon.”

That was the day I’d been with Barry in the Press Club, the day before he dropped out of sight. I ground out my cigarette and put the ashtray on the stand next to the chair. “Did he say what the book’s about?”

“He was reluctant. I think that’s why I wanted to see a sample. I assumed it’s autobiographical, but maybe that’s just because he’s led such an interesting life.”

“They’re a lot more fun to read about than to lead,” I said. “I don’t know where Barry is. I’m not alone. His employers have hired me to try to find him. He may have gone underground because of a hot potato he was working on. The hot potato may be the book. It may be he’s trying to duck a grand jury investigation. He’s had some personal problems lately and it may be those. In any case you could be the last person he had contact with before he slid offstage.”

“I have an alibi. I was in New York at the time.”

I stared at her.

She colored just a little. “Sorry. I plead jet lag. Do you think you can find him?”

“I’ve been in this line a long time, Mrs. Starr. I get asked that question twice a week. I’m fresh out of answers. I can’t see through walls or read the future in sheep intestines. I’m pretty good, but I’m not that good.”

“It would be worth a great deal to the firm I work for if you could answer the question,” she said. “It would be worth a great deal to me.”

I sat there for another second. Then I stood and picked up her empty glass. “More juice?” She shook her head. I took the glass back into the kitchen and rinsed it out and wiped it off and put it next to the others in the cupboard. I didn’t even look at the fresh bottle of Hiram Walker’s on the same shelf. Back in the living room I sat down and said, “Your job’s that thin?”

She crossed her ankles in that way she had that could empty a gentlemen’s smoker across town. “I edited a biography of a dead movie star by the movie star’s daughter. It contained two lines on the movie star’s affair with a captain of industry I’d thought was dead. The biography was a Book-of-the-Month-Club featured alternate and two producers were bidding for motion picture rights. Then the captain of industry came out of the woodwork with a battery of corporate lawyers and got every copy yanked off the stands. The publishing business isn’t the automobile industry; it isn’t equipped to handle a one hundred percent recall. Yes, my job’s that thin. Thin enough I don’t dare put this trip on the pad. I’m just hoping that when I get back I won’t find some bright young thing who cut her capped teeth editing westerns sitting at my desk.”

“How do you stand it?” I asked.

“I put myself through college proofreading mathematic texts for a small academic house in Boston. After graduation I spent four years as a reader for a senior editor at the house I’m working for now, one of these self-styled Max Perkinses with a red beard who thought his writers should clear every apostrophe and semicolon with him before they submitted a word. He went on to greater glory condensing books for a national magazine, but it was another two years before I got my present desk and half a window looking out on the screw top of the Chrysler Building. In the meantime I corrected other editors’ spelling and once talked a former Great American Writer who was sitting in a furnished apartment with the telephone in one hand and a revolver in the other out of pulling the trigger on himself. Now I go to sleep at night reading typescripts and spend four-hour lunches listening to would-be Norman Mailers mewing about essential punctuation and one bad review written by a freelancer with hemorrhoids for a regional magazine no one ever heard of, when I should be in front of the board going to the that for a first novel by an unknown writer of rare genius. I hold their heads when they’re blocked. I canvass the bars and police stations when they’re on a binge. I listen politely to counter-offers by literary agents who think their clients are working for them, and when I’m not doing that or brushing up on the American League standings in case I should find myself in the elevator with the man who owns the firm I work for, I sometimes squeeze in a few minutes to edit someone’s book. And all the time I’m counting the months since I delivered my last best seller and wondering how much longer the dry spell will last before they show me the door.”

She recrossed her ankles the other way. “I don’t know how I stand any of it, Mr. Walker. But I do, and if I ever had to stop I suppose I’d become the mistress of someone in the publishing business just to stay near it. Will you accept me as your client? Just me, this time. We won’t bother the boys on the top floor.”

I grinned. “That’s some pep talk. I bet it sounds good Monday mornings at the dressing table.”

This time she didn’t flush. “When you read too much you tend to talk in soliloquies to anyone who will let you get away with it. Are you working for me?”

“I’m already working, Mrs. Starr. One client at a time will do. Otherwise the paperwork would kill me.”

“You’re too honest.”

I moved a shoulder.

She stood. I got up with her. “Will you call me when you’ve found him?” she asked. “After your client, of course. I’m staying at the Book Cadillac. Appropriate, don’t you think?”

“Last time it was the Westin.”

“Last time I flew first class. That’s one of the reasons books cost so much. You’ll call?”

“I’ll call.” I got the door for her.

“I’ll be there through the weekend.” On the threshold she looked at me. “You promised me a tour of the city last time.”

“How’s Mr. Starr?”

“In New York.”

I said nothing again. She waited a little, then said goodbye and went out trailing jasmine.

A
CME
C
OLLISION CLANGED
and racketed inside a hangarlike building with a hip roof and lime-washed barn siding and its name painted inexpertly over the doors in red letters spidering down the front in streaks. The sun was warm on the asphalt outside, where a row of hulks with accordioned front ends squatted on blocks. In the corner nearest the street, two boys of about eleven were peering through the windows of a fresh wreck with a head-size hole in the windshield on the driver’s side and brown stains on the upholstery. While I was locking my car, a loose length of redheaded man in greasy coveralls came out of the building with a wrench in one hand and chased the boys back to their bicycles. They kicked loose the stands and when they were rolling they turned in their seats to gesture obscenely back with enviable choreography. The redhead lunged forward, shaking the wrench. They leaned over the handlebars and pumped their legs like pistons and pulled away fast. Their pursuer stopped, spat. “Little bastids.” I recognized the Kentucky accent from my telephone call yesterday.

I intercepted him on his way back inside and asked where I could find Wally Petite. His eyes traveled over my suit. They were a baked-out blue under pale brows as thick and as straight as an accusing finger. Finally he pointed his wrench through the spread doors. “Office.”

I entered ahead of him and paused while my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light inside. Most of it was coming from a dropcord hooked on the edge of an open pickup hood, where a broad back was bent in gray coveralls with
ACME COLLISION
stenciled across it. On the far side of the big room, another set of coveralls whooshed clouds of acrid-smelling blue paint from a spray gun over a white Lincoln with masking on the windows and trim. A third worker had a door panel clamped in a wooden vise on one of the steel workbenches that lined the room and was banging out the dents with a short-handled sledgehammer in time with the music blasting out of a portable radio at his feet. He was naked to the waist and his arms bulged when he swung back the heavy hammer. Every time it struck home he said, “Huh!” Sweat rolled off his slick torso, overpowering the odors of stale grease and turpentine sunk into the walls.

The office was a glassed-in cubicle to the left of the doors. The door was propped open with a brick and I went in without knocking. It wouldn’t have been heard over the music and pounding anyway.

“Have a seat, Walker. Close the door.”

I kicked the brick out of the way and pushed the door shut. The noise level went down a notch.

The man who had spoken was hunched over an old Adler on a stand behind an oak desk with a cracked veneer, plucking at the keys with one index finger and taking all the time in the world to select his next letter. He had on a salmon-colored shirt with puffed sleeves and the collar spread over a tight black vest with gold fleurs-de-lis on the back. A gold chain glittered among the dark hairs on his swarthy chest. He wore his brown hair long and full on the sides in styled waves to bring out his high cheekbones, and the one eye I could see in profile had lashes long enough to trap a bird. A black jacket with peaked lapels faced in velour draped a wooden hanger on a hook on the door I had just closed.

“Mr. Petite?”

“With you in a minute. Sit down. I usually have someone fill in these applications for title for me, but she’s out sick. Funny how many employees take ill these last few weeks of good weather.”

His voice was absolutely smooth, not so much polished as lathed down, with no hint of geography or origins and only so many tones as he needed to make himself understood. A perfect cylinder. I turned a chair made of steel tubing and red vinyl to face the desk and trusted my weight to it. A picture calendar on the one wall that wasn’t glass behind the desk showed a gang of gray moustaches in scarlet jackets and jodhpurs leaning horses around a copse of trees in pursuit of a red-brown streak with the hounds in full cry between. Whenever I saw a print like that I wondered what happened to the fox. I decided I didn’t want to know.

“There!”

He struck one last key and rolled the sheet out of the typewriter. When he turned my way I saw that his left eyelid drooped a little, as if a nerve or a muscle had been severed. It spoiled his girlish good looks. “I’m sorry about the condition of the place,” he said. “We’re moving to larger quarters end of next month. My office will be on a different floor from the nuts and bolts, air-conditioned and soundproofed.”

I said, “The body game must be booming.”

He didn’t take the bait. “It’s always good. When the economy’s rolling so are the cars, and the more cars on the road the more likely they are to run into each other. Then when money’s tight everyone saves by holding on to the old wreck and they bring it in here to keep it looking good. You should see some of the crates that limp in. By the time we’re done stripping them to the frame and replacing the rusty parts with sheet metal and pounding out the dents and repainting and rechroming them, their owners might as well have bought a new one hot off the line. But we earn it, and there’s real satisfaction in turning a clunker into a classic.”

“Kind of like surgery,” I said. “Only more fulfilling.”

That time his face shut down. He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers, and Lou Gallardo was wrong; there was no grease under his nails. A gold ingot flashed on the third finger of his left hand. “You wanted to talk about Phil.”

“I think the man I’m looking for was investigating his murder when he disappeared. Maybe you’ve seen him.” I described Barry.

“No one who answers that description has been in here. No one has come around asking about Phil. You’re the first in more than a year.”

“Maybe he spoke to one of your employees.”

“I’d have been told. What makes you think he was interested in what happened to Phil?”

“He had a file folder full of newspaper clippings in his office. The piece about the cops finding Niles’s body was among them.”

“That’s all?”

“Amigo Fuentes told me a blond man with a limp was in asking about Niles last week.”

“Amigo Fuentes.” He made as if to crack his knuckles. “That son-of-a-bitch greaser killed Phil and got clean away. Maybe he killed your friend too.”

Something about the way he said the Cuban’s name. Not the way someone whose ancestors came from a cold climate would have said it. I got out my pack and offered him a cigarette. He hesitated, then took one. I struck a match and lit it and one for me. “In that case he wouldn’t have told me Barry had been there,” I said. “And Fuentes was in Florida at the time of the murder.”

“He had it catered.”

Our smoke curled and mingled in the air. Smoke doesn’t care what kind of company it keeps.

I said, “How hard did the police question you about your partner?”