Every Brilliant Eye (12 page)

“Pretty hard. When I was younger I was pretty wild. I have a record for theft. But that’s behind me, and I could account for all my movements. They wanted Fuentes worse. I guess you know about Acme’s reputation.”

“A little.”

He scraped some ash off on the edge of a Styrofoam cup on the desk. “I’m not making any confession today. But small businesses have a steep hike the first year or so. You tend to get involved in things you wouldn’t if your old age didn’t depend on them.”

“You’re no longer heisting cars?”

“I never said we were.”

His voice presented no ethnic or environmental handles whatsoever. Someone had put in his share of hours on this one. I used the cup. “Anyone can cater a kill. Five grand will buy the best talent Hazel Park has to offer, complete with a virgin piece and a new demonstrator model borrowed off a Ford lot for the get-gone. If you’re strapped you can go down Woodward and hire it for the price of a lid, but the quality will suffer. There’s a whole range of working muscle in between.”

“The point being?”

“The point being that if, say, a former mechanic with a police record, in partnership with a businessman who won’t see the profit in certain trade practices, wanted him gone, his partner’s involvement with a loan shark could stir up some useful dust.”

“I think I’ve just been accused of contracting a murder,” he said. “I wouldn’t know, of course.”

“I’m just poking at the haystack. All I’ve got is a newspaper clipping and the word of a shylock.”

“We’re through talking now.” He swiveled his chair and turned a knob with exposed wires running up the wall, like an antique light switch. A loud burring ring like an amplified telephone bell echoed through the building. It was still fading when the door opened and two men came in. One was the lanky redhead who had chased the kids away from the wreck out front. He still had the wrench. His companion was the man I’d seen beating the door panel in the vise. He had a bald head and a matted black tangle of beard that spread into the hair on his chest and the muscles of his torso bunched and squirmed as he worked his hands on the sledge across his thighs. “Make sure this gentleman finds his way out,” Petite told them. To me: “Unless you bend a fender, don’t come back. A man that doesn’t know his way around the equipment in places like this ... ” He gestured with the cigarette between his fingers.

“I have to admire me.” I got up. “I’m unstoppable. They bounce jack handles off my stomach and throw me in with the big cats and I keep coming. I don’t even pause to count my teeth. So long, Mr. Petite.”

“Good-bye, Walker. Thanks for the smoke. I’m trying to cut down.”

“That’s what I was counting on.”

After unlocking both offices and throwing away my mail I didn’t know what to do next. I looked at Barry’s typescript, which I’d brought with me from home, but I didn’t feel like reading. I didn’t even know why I’d brought it. It wasn’t doing me any good.

The first lead never leads anywhere. You spot a bright thread and pick at it, hoping the whole dense fabric will come apart in your hands, and then it catches and you tug and it snaps and there you are staring at the frazzled end. But there was still the blond cripple Fuentes had said was also curious about the Niles murder. The shark might have known those things about Barry from his column, but even crooks don’t lie just for practice. I called Jed Dutt at the
News.

“Any sign of the boy reporter?” I asked.

“None. Which answers
my
question. Anything else?”

“You remember who got the Philip Niles case?”

He went to get his notes. I listened to a lone typewriter somewhere clacking out its last days amid creeping technology. They used to argue about sex and politics at parties. Now they talk software. He came back on the line.

“Sergeant Ysabel, with a Y, of the Royal Oak Police Department. He’s with Detroit now. Major Crimes. Or was last I heard.”

I mouthed gratitude and punched off and dialed Detroit Police Headquarters. The switchboard put me through to Major Crimes. “Sergeant Ysabel,” I said.

“You mean Lieutenant Ysabel,” a woman’s voice corrected. “He won’t be in until four. Can I take a message?”

I said I’d call after four. Replacing the receiver, I looked at Barry’s script again.

There is a specialist with the First Air Cavalry, a large fellow with football shoulders and gentle brown eyes who grins easily and wears his helmet tipped forward with the strap buckled under the bulge of his head to keep it from skidding over his eyes. The prostitutes in town, whether or not they are out with other men, are always making excuses to touch him and stand close to him with their eyes sliding sideways to look at his profile. He is popular with the men of his unit, but officers do not like him, as he has a quick mouth and even when he is carrying out an order behaves as if he just thought of it himself. We met some weeks ago by accident during a shelling. I like him and think he is the reason I have stayed in this area so long rather than moving ahead with the main column.

Last week while on patrol he came upon a Vietcong standing over what remained of a specialist with whom he’d gone through basic training. He went on spraying lead into the Cong seconds after his body stopped twitching, until his M-16 clicked empty. None of the other Americans who witnessed the incident dared step forward before then.

Today we went into town together for a drink. He smokes heavily, and through the haze his grin is as quick and his eyes are as gentle. His repartee is as lively and he is no less responsive to the admiring glances of the prostitutes.

It is not in the little ways we show change.

Well, what did you expect, Barry? It’s like when you see a movie or read a book you liked years before, and not only do you not like it, you can’t imagine ever having been the sort of person who would. And basic training or no, I had never been all that close to Spec-4 Michael Valducci, who ate his squid raw and cleaned his rifle with whoever’s jockstrap was handy. He was just a constant face in a shifting sea and then he wasn’t.

They sent us halfway around the world to a place where our fillings rusted in our mouths and declared open season on jungle creatures with leaves on their heads and bags of rice on thongs around their necks. Russian MIGs shrieked overhead in formations no farther apart than spread fingers and American F-111s sprayed villages with a gelatinous mass that caught fire with a sucking sound when it hit the air. We hunted Charlie and we plowed the girls in Saigon and it was like one of those lost continent pictures with rubber dinosaurs and midget actors made up like ape men, that you hoot at in the theater and then when the lights go up you go outside and breathe cold air and listen to tires swishing down the street and already it’s fading. Six months later you put your hand in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn in a while and come out with the stub and then you remember. Jesus, but that was a lousy picture.

Only it wasn’t a ticket stub that brought it back, but a glimpse of the neighbor’s Asian gardener weeding the lawn or a traffic helicopter chattering over the house or the sunlight coming green through leaves in a park at a moment when you’re thinking about anything but Vietnam. Then you think about nothing but, and then you get mad because the whole thing has ruined you for those moments, and maybe forever, the way learning of the death of a close relative while your favorite song is playing on the radio will have you thinking of the death every time you hear the song from then on. It wasn’t at all like a bad movie, or even like a bad dream. It was like nothing for anyone who wasn’t there.

I restacked the typewritten sheets and pushed them to one side and thought about what I should do next. I was suddenly thirsty and thought about the bottle in the bottom drawer of the desk. It seemed a corny place to keep a bottle; why didn’t I have a bar? But Mr. John T. Molloy said professionals who want to look professional didn’t have bars in their offices. A careful man, Mr. Molloy. He would wear pinstriped pajamas to bed and line up his slippers with the toes pointed out and when he had breakfast he would take his coffee and his toast first and then his eggs and bacon, one strip, fried not too crisp, because that was how professionals slept and ate breakfast. I thought of all that and then I wasn’t thirsty anymore. I said to hell with Mr. Molloy and his pajamas and bacon and got out my little sheaf of Xeroxed clippings. On top was the long piece about Alfred Kindnagel, the Jewish labor chief.

The main photograph was one of these flattering studio jobs shot through a Kleenex, of a man with a large dome, jug ears, a comfortable set of chins, smiling eyes, and twelve black hairs strung across his scalp. He wore a brown suit with a stripe that was almost invisible and a softly shining sepia necktie. It was the kind of thing they frame in heavy gilt and hang in the boardroom with a brass plaque reading
OUR FOUNDER
. The others were more casual: Kindnagel, much younger and slimmer but already losing his hair, conversing earnestly in his shirtsleeves with a group of mortar-smeared bricklayers during the labor crises of the Depression; Kindnagel, aging, sitting on a bench outside a congressional committee hearing room, slumped in his overcoat with the brim of his hat turned up and a bodyguard seated on either side; Kindnagel in retirement, broad, bald, and beaming, pale belly hanging outside his swim trunks, tossing a ball for his six-year-old granddaughter at the beach; Kindnagel at his brother’s funeral, tired and emaciated-looking, leaning on the arms of his wife and middle-aged daughter. The caption said that was his most recent photograph. It was probably his last, as he died shortly before the article appeared.

The story concentrated on his early years and the quiet methods by which he had obtained power among Jewish workers while the nation was watching the brawls and sit-down strikes at River Rouge and the machine guns atop the Ford plant, and on the efforts of the FBI, once it had belatedly taken notice of him, to harass him into retirement because of “leftist leanings.” But 117 hours of telephone taps at his home and office had yielded nothing more instructive than a crash course in the Yiddish vernacular and his mother’s matzoh recipe. Twelve years later he bowed out of public life for reasons of health and thereafter divided his seasons between the family home in Bloomfield Hills and a small estate in Miami.

His widow’s name was Grete. Just for fun I looked her up in the directory. A G. Kindnagel was listed in Bloomfield Hills. I looked at my watch. I had four and a half hours to kill before Lieutenant Ysabel reported for duty.

“Hello?”

An elderly woman’s voice. “Grete Kindnagel?” I asked.

“This is Grete Kindnagel. Please, who is speaking?”

“I’m a Detroit private investigator looking into the disappearance of a man who I think may have been researching your late husband’s life when he vanished. I wondered if I could come over sometime and talk to you about it.”

There was a little silence before she asked the question.

“Is this Mr. Stackpole?”

A
TISSUE OF CLOUD
slid past the window, graying out the square of yellow on the desk and floor. I waited until it passed.

“My name is Amos Walker,” I told Grete Kindnagel then. “Has Barry Stackpole been in contact with you?”

“He called. Last week sometime, I don’t know what day just. They have to tell me when it’s Saturday so I remember not to cook or clean house. He asked could he come over, talk about Alf, just like you. I told him to come ahead. But he didn’t.” She paused, and I heard her breath trembling. “Is it about Alf’s pension?”

I assured her it wasn’t. “What did Stackpole say?”

“What I said. He said he didn’t want to talk about it over the phone. I made tea and put some cookies on a plate. I always have refreshments when visitors come. Only he didn’t.”

“Is it all right if I come over now? I have some questions to ask. It won’t take long.”

“I guess. But I’m not putting the water on until you get here.”

I got directions and cruised on out.

The feudal lines are softening around Detroit. In the old days, the blue collars and lunch pails kept to the city, with its weatherworn apartment buildings and miles of housing developments as alike as hiccups, while the gold collar pins and silver fox furs breathed the bottled air in Grosse Pointe. But then wages rose, drawing itinerant field hands up from Kentucky and Tennessee and Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi in their rattletrap trucks and touring cars to the automobile factories and creating a new class among the workers already on the scene, who fled north and west and staked out their own communities with names like Birmingham and Beverly Hills and Madison Heights and Pleasant Ridge, places with country clubs and basements with walnut paneling and blue shag rugs for the neighbors to sit around in sipping gin rickeys and talking about lawn edgers and orgasms. Bloomfield Hills was one of these, grown up around a sprawl of half-timbered buildings established by newspaper magnate George G. Booth in the 1920s, inspired by Hearst’s castle at San Simeon and including a church, private schools, an art school, and a science museum, under the name of the Cranbrook Institute. The homes were laid out in kind: bricks of hedges and redwood fences around backyard swimming pools, gaslights and Neighborhood Watch decals in the windows.

The address Grete Kindnagel had given me belonged to a large brick house with wings on either side and red-painted shutters on at least a dozen windows facing the street. It had a half-acre of front lawn with one of those marble birdbaths on it that are made to look like Roman ruins and a circular composition driveway containing a gold Continental Mark IV glittering in a puddle of water that reflected the clouds skidding overhead. I parked behind it and mounted a fresh concrete slab in front of the door and used the knocker. It was shaped like a ram’s head with a ring in its mouth. Somewhere a motor with a long piston stroke was making a noise like pea soup coming to a boil.

“Yes?”

I looked at a tall man in his thirties with dark hair combed forward over an advancing brow and dark eyes I thought looked familiar without knowing why, and then I remembered the portrait of Alfred Kindnagel that had accompanied Jed Dutt’s article. He had on a white tennis shirt with a chesspiece embroidered on the left breast, rumpled gray cotton slacks, and black oxfords. He kept his hand on the knob of the open door.