Every Brilliant Eye (17 page)

I grinned. “That’s worse than smoking after sex.”

“You don’t have to answer.”

“Once.”

“Your wife?”

“No. I thought I was but I wasn’t. Someone else. Someone recent.”

“Was she here?”

“Yeah.”

“Should we have gone to the hotel?”

I shook my head. “I thought about not bringing you here. Then I thought it’d be like when someone dies and you get a chill every time you walk past her room and it made me think of the old lady in the rotting wedding dress still waiting for the guy that left her at the altar.”

“Miss Havisham.
Great Expectations
.” She saw me looking at her and colored. “Sorry, but I am in the business. Did she leave you?”

I stubbed out the cigarette in the china saucer I use for an ashtray. “I’ve got Barry’s manuscript.”

It took her a second to catch up. She drew up her legs with the sheet over her breasts and clasped her hands around her knees and rested her chin on them. Naked, she looked more like an editor in that moment than she had in any of her tailored suits. “How long have you had it?”

“Since day before yesterday.”

“Wasn’t that the day you were hired to look for him?”

“For him. Not his book.”

“May I see it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I stole it. If he wanted me to have it I wouldn’t have had to steal it and if he doesn’t want me to have it he doesn’t want me showing it around.”

“But he called me, wanting to sell it.”

“He wanted to sell a book. It might not be this one. Chances are it isn’t, because this one looks fairly complete and he told me he was taking the time off to finish a book. But none of that means anything because I don’t have his permission to show anything.”

“Well, why’d you tell me you have it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the damnedest thing and I had to tell somebody.”

“What’s the book about?”

“Vietnam.”

“Vietnam books are big,” she said after a space. “If I told the board I had a line on one by Barry Stackpole I wouldn’t have to worry about my job until the next dry spell.”

“You won’t, though.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because if you promise them a book and then something happens and it doesn’t come through they’ll empty your desk drawers into a suitcase and send it to you.”

“That’s not how they work. But I see what you mean.” She tossed her head so that her hair fell behind her shoulders. “Why did you steal it?”

“I don’t know that either. There’s something about it. I keep thinking that if I read it closely enough I’ll find out what’s been bothering Barry.”

“Isn’t it the story you think he was working on? The hot potato?”

“It goes back further than that. I think. We haven’t been in touch on a regular basis for a long time. Eleven months ago he took up with the sort of person you don’t take up with unless you’ve stopped liking yourself. Then he started drinking hard. Not that he ever drank soft, but this time it was hard enough to land him in AA. Something happened. Whether it was something new or something further back, I don’t know, any more than I know what it was. Maybe it’s in the book.”

“Maybe it
is
the book. All those memories coming back in the writing. The war.”

“Maybe.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“That flashback thing’s been done and done,” I said. “Every time a guy knocks over a gun shop and it turns out he’s a vet, his lawyer says he thought the counterman was Cong and the street outside was mined. Barry’s too original for that. It’s a cliché like sex and cigarettes.”

She said, “I’ve spent most of my adult life around writers, a lot of them hacks and a couple of authentic geniuses. Even the geniuses couldn’t manage to live lives that were wholly original.”

“It’s not like it is in books.”

“That’s why people read them. What are you going to do?”

“Find Barry.”

“Such a simple goal,” she said. “For such a complex character.”

“I am an anomaly.”

Her eyes were pure lavender in the gray light. “Hard to get close to.”

I took the hint and shifted closer. She ran a finger down my jaw, letting the sheet fall from her breasts. Her hand kept going, following the line of my throat and the lapel of my robe down to where the belt tied.

I saw her to the lobby of her hotel, where a neat black security man in a gold blazer took his attention from the row of closed-circuit television monitors over his desk to glare at me. I glared back until he looked away. “Call me?” Louise asked.

I said I would and pressed the button for the elevator.

“Not just if you find something out,” she said. “Any reason will do.”

The doors opened and she stepped inside, past a man coming out who hesitated for an instant, wondering whether he should get back on. But by then the doors were closing on a dream in blue and gray. The security man hadn’t asked to see her key before letting her go up. With me they unbutton the flaps over their holsters.

I used one of a bank of pay telephones off the front desk.

“Acme Collision.”

This was a new voice, youthful, male, gum snapping. In the background a welding torch hummed and splattered sparks. I asked for Mr. Petite.

“He’s at lunch. Back at three.”

“Where can I get in touch with him? It’s urgent.”

“Hang on.”

The radio was playing loudly under the noise of the torch. I held the receiver away from my ear until he returned.

“Curly’s, on Fenkell in Highland Park. Know it?”

“That’s a bar.”

“I never said he was eating, ace.” I got hung up on.

I drove to the low brick building on Fenkell, which was just five minutes away from Acme. It was a few minutes past one and the parking lot was filled. Not a lot gets done in Highland Park after lunch. I circled the place twice before a yellow Cavalier convertible pried itself loose from a space near the door. A green Charger that had been waiting leaned on its horn when I swung into the opening. The driver saluted me with a finger when I climbed out. I waved back.

The interior was cool and lighted only by the rosy lamps behind the bar. They didn’t reach far enough to show anyone inside who you were leaving with. Guitar music floated out of a hidden speaker. I was still standing in the entrance, getting used to the change in visibility, when a red-faced character in a blue silk bowling shirt with
Ed
stitched over the pocket swung through the door, banging me with the handle. When I turned, tiny eyes lit on me.

“That was my space you took, fucker.”

“Sorry.”

He rocked back on his heels and came forward on his toes. I had six inches on him, but he was built like a sack of angle irons. “I didn’t hear that, fucker. Let’s hear you say it again like you mean it.”

I turned the rest of the way so that I was looking down on him. I really needed a scene. Like a cover girl needs acne I needed a scene. I took hold of the collar of his bowling shirt and twisted.

“Don’t mix up good manners with no guts,” I said. I didn’t speak any louder than the general whisper of conversation in the room.

His face got redder. His eyes lost focus. At length he nodded quickly. I let go and he turned around and went out, muttering, “All a guy wants is a drink.”

I went to the bar, set at an angle to the door. The bartender, a big black with a moustache and gray in his natural, was looking at me with his hand wrapped in a chamois inside a glass that was already sparkling.

“Trouble?”

“The guy was right,” I said. “I just wasn’t in the mood for him to be right. Wally Petite here?”

He went on looking at me with his hand in the glass. I got out my wallet and laid a five-dollar bill on the bar. He didn’t look at it.

“This is a good bar, mister,” he said. “Maybe not the best bar in the world, but not the kind of place you seem to be used to either. You want to see a customer, you give me your name, I ask him does he want to see you. Otherwise buy a drink or get out.”

“A hundred tap-jockeys in this town and I had to draw an honor graduate of the Dearborn School of Bartending Arts. Pour me a Stroh’s and deal me change.”

He did that, pocketing the chamois, and that was when I knew there had been something in it besides his hand. I sat on the end stool, sipping and watching the smoked-glass mirror that ran the length of the wall near the ceiling, tilted forward to take in the entire room. I spotted him finally near the windows. He was sitting at a table with the red-haired hillbilly and the bald man with the great beard and another man I didn’t recognize, a graying number in gold-rimmed glasses and a tan suit with a windowpane pattern that was so faint it almost wasn’t there. I saw the light glinting off the gold chain around Petite’s neck before I saw anything else. He was wearing a burgundy jacket today, over a pale blue silk shirt open to his ribs. It would be like a former mechanic with sudden money to dress out of
California Today
.

He and the gray-haired man were talking and laughing in a relaxed sort of way that suggested the business part was over. The two other men from the body shop drank beer and said nothing. They had on clean shirts and jackets that didn’t match their trousers. They were amateurs. Professional bodyguards were more successful at not looking like bodyguards.

I was still sipping and watching the mirror and thinking when a white man twenty years younger than my bartender but dressed the same, in white shirt and black clip-on tie, came in through a door at the end of the bar buttoning his shirtcuffs. My bartender said something to him and he nodded and then my bartender took off his apron and stashed it under the bar and went out through the same door.

I finished my beer, signaled his replacement for another, left a buck for it, and got down to find a pay telephone. There were three in the hallway to the men’s room. I took note of the number on the dial of the one in the center and went to the one farthest from the bar and dropped two dimes and dialed the number.

Leaning against the wall with the receiver to my ear I watched the young bartender set down my beer and a fresh napkin where I had been sitting and come over, mopping his hands on his apron. I turned my back. When he answered I said, “Mr. Petite, please. Wally Petite.”

“See if he’s here.”

The bartender laid the receiver on the ledge under the instrument and went back to page Petite. I hung up, stepped to the telephone nearest the bar, picked up the handset, and waited with my back to the hallway entrance.

I
SMELLED HIS COLOGNE
first, one of those sticky brands with jungle names that smell like burnt leather. As he walked past me with his hand out to pick up the vacant receiver I looped the cord of the one I was holding over his head and pulled. The cord drew tight around his throat before he could get his hands on it. He tried anyway. They always do. He said, “Gkkk!”

“Amos Walker,” I said, next to his ear. “We spoke yesterday. Now let’s say something.”

“Gkkk!”

“Three years ago, Lieutenant Ray Blankenship of the Fourteenth Precinct arrested you for stripping a parked car. You pulled some light time, then lucked into a partnership with a guy that got killed by someone who knew how to do it. Two days ago, Blankenship pulled his own plug. You’re bad luck, pal. I want to know how come.”

He said it again. I glanced back over my shoulder. The bartender was leaning on his forearms on the other end of the bar, talking to a brunette in a dark red shift and pearls. From where he stood we were two guys using the telephones. I turned back to Petite and loosened the cord a little. He sucked in air loudly.

“You son—”

I pulled the cord tight. He grunted and tried to elbow me in the ribs, but he didn’t have the room to do it right. This time I hung on until he started to go slack. When I relaxed, his lungs creaked.

“I got friends here,” he gasped. “They’ll bust you good.”

“Wally, your grammar’s slipping. You won’t be here to see them bust me, get it? You’ll be too busy holding your breath.”

He made no reply. I started to tighten the cord again. He said, “Don’t! We’ll talk.”

“Start with you and Blankenship.”

“I was boosting a couple of things. It was while I was working at the dealership. The sons of bitches weren’t paying me anything. A guy’s got to live. I didn’t see Blankenship. He was off-duty, picking up something for his wife on the way home, something like that, I don’t remember. He came up behind me and asked if I had car trouble. I tried to bluff it out, said it was my car and it wouldn’t start. He wanted to see my license and registration. I got three months and a day.”

“Records gave me that much. Skip to Phil Niles. Why’d you have him killed and what did Blankenship have to do with it?”

“I didn’t have him k—”

I leaned back hard. He struggled, relaxed. I held on. He struggled again, and then he relaxed for real. His face went black and the only thing holding him up was the cord.

When I let go his knees gave. I got an arm around his chest under his arms and let the receiver dangle while I slapped his cheek. He was pale now, paler than his shirt. His color returned in patches. I looked back toward the bartender, who was topping off the brunette’s glass from a bottle of Chianti.

“We go on,” I said. “Alfred Kindnagel. Where’s he come in?”

“I don’t know anybody by that name.” His voice came through six layers of gauze.

“Wally ... ”

“I don’t! I swear! Who’s Alan Kindnagel?”

“No good, Wally. Either you remember the name or you forget it entirely. If you got it wrong it wouldn’t be the Alfred part. What about Morris Rosenberg? He ate some bullets on Eight Mile Road eight years back. Kindnagel was his union boss.”

“Christ, eight years ago I’d never seen this town.”

“Okay, let’s just for now say it was before your time. Who killed Niles for you?”

“Niles?”

“Niles. N is for the nasty names you call me. I is for the illness you’ll go through. L is for the lies you try to tell me. E is for—”

Cold air from something that had plenty of it to give prickled the down on my neck behind my right ear. I stopped singing.