Every Brilliant Eye (27 page)

I stood up, brushing incriminating fibers off my clothes, and glanced around one last time. There were no file cabinets or other promising repositories of information. The place was just a telephone number and a place to pick up mail, as Dave had said. Yesterday’s mail would have been kicked downtown already and today’s wasn’t due for another hour. I stooped to pick up the High Standard, dropped it into the pocket of my jacket, and let myself out quietly. No one hollered cop.

H
OME IS A PLACE
you can go where they have to take you in. There was no one to take me in but it was closer than the office and there’s a long list of things I’d rather do than drive anywhere near downtown on a Saturday morning with a murder weapon in my pocket.

The coffee was still warm. I poured myself a cup, leaving a quarter-inch space on top, then remembered I was out of whiskey and brought the surface level with the rim. I sat in the living room warming my hands around the cup with the pistol lying on the end table and drinking the bitter stuff. Thinking was hard without whiskey.

When the cup was empty I called my office building and let the telephone ring until the super picked it up.

“This is Walker in 307,” I said. “Which one of my neighbors discovered the dead bum in the foyer the other day?”

“Which one, how do I know which one?” His voice was thicker than usual. I’d gotten him out of bed. “The police bang on your door, you don’t ask who invited them.”

“Who did the banging, the black cop with the scar or the white cop with the hat and moustache?”

“The black one. The one was here again this morning.”

I uncrossed my legs. “When this morning?”

“When, how do I know when? Early. I got up to fix a busted pipe and he walked right past my door. Didn’t say hello.”

I hung up, lit a cigarette, and dialed John Alderdyce’s extension at 1300.

“Alderdyce.”

“Walker, John. I wasn’t sure I’d catch you on duty Saturday.”

“We never close. What’s on your mind that I’d rather not have on mine?”

“I need the personnel file on a Homicide dick. You know him. Sergeant Grice.”

“Christ.”

“That mean you won’t do it, or it’s tough?”

“I’d have to know why you want it. Just for my own peace of mind, what’s left of it.”

“I can’t say till I’ve seen it. I could be way off and I don’t want any more enemies on the department than I have now.”

“Meaning I do.”

“It’s a favor,” I said. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t ask, because it means your talking to too many people. But this one transferred over from Vice not long ago and the file might still be lying around Homicide. If not, forget it. All I’ve got is a guess.”

“Am I in on the kill?”

“I don’t think so. If I’m right this is one for Major Crimes.”

“Where do I come out ahead, then?”

“Name it.”

I didn’t like the length of the pause after that.

“I’d rather not,” he said.

“Blank check?”

“Call it a blind loan. My favor to call in any time the urge lands.”

“You wouldn’t settle for dinner.”

“Not in any place you can afford.”

“Okay,” I said. “There’s just one thing I need from the file. I need to know if Grice served in Vietnam. Specifically if he was stationed in Hue about the time of the Cambodia invasion.”

“Why?”

I told him then, leaving out Edward Sunburn for the time being. After a long silence he said: “You better be right.”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t be calling you.”

“I’ll get back to you. You at home?”

I said I was. Twenty minutes slithered by, one by one on their bellies. I poured myself another slug of caffeine, lingered over it. Outside, the gutters clogged with dead leaves. I caught the telephone halfway through the first ring.

“Hue,” Alderdyce said. “He was a sparks with ARVN, one of the first in after the Cong bugged out in ‘67 and he was still there three years later.”

“Anything else?”

“Anything else isn’t part of our bargain. But that’s it. They don’t leave much room for biography in those little blanks.”

“Thanks, John.”

“Who you working with on this?”

It was my turn to pause. “Ysabel.”

“Good choice,” he said. “Yeah, good choice. Don’t get killed, okay? I hate wasting favors.”

I thanked him again and broke the connection. With the receiver still in my hand I dialed 911. I didn’t know how the Pinkertons did it before A.G. Bell. When a black female voice came on I said: “This is Amos Walker, 614 Russell. There’s a dead derelict in my backyard. I think his throat’s been cut.”

She asked me to repeat the message. I did and gave her my name and address again. She said an officer would be calling on me.

I worked the plunger again and called police headquarters again. An unfamiliar male voice came on after four rings and said Lieutenant Ysabel had stepped out for a half hour. I left a message and had him read it back to make sure he got it straight. I didn’t like that part of it at all.

My ear felt hot from the receiver. I got up and walked around, working my limbs and neck. Someday I was going to invest in one of those telephone headsets like reporters have. It was on the list after air conditioning and a desk chair that tilted back and turned into a waterbed.

While I was thinking about it I drew out the live cartridge remaining in the two-shot .22, put the cartridge in my pocket, and got my Smith & Wesson out of the drawer in the telephone stand and made sure there was one in the barrel. For now I would go with the tools I had.

M
AYBE IT WAS
the caffeine.

Sitting in my one and only easy chair waiting for the door buzzer, I was an insomniac staring at a dark ceiling and projecting pictures on the blank space. Thoughts charged through my mind in a hot string like a thousand-car train barreling through a long black tunnel. In the lighted windows flashing past I glimpsed faces: Barry and Catherine and Dale and John and in the caboose a character with graying brown hair and gentle eyes and a chin that would always be blue, someone familiar, but whose name I couldn’t think of because I never called him by it. I wanted to run ahead and get a look inside the engine cab, see who was driving, but by then the last window had streaked around the long curve and the train was gone, chuckling in the distance. I didn’t need to see the engineer’s face anyway. It would be the same face I had seen in the caboose. I knew now what was meant by the term “waking dream,” and why no one much liked them.

When you are small the whole world turns on your axis. Countries are being built up and torn down and people are slashing at one another all around you and none of it means anything because no matter what happens you’re safe there in the center. Then when you get to adolescence and the college money has dried up you have to go to work for it and you’re part of the turning outer circle. You adjust to that and have a picture of yourself and you think that’s who you are. You go out in the world with your new degree under your arm and maybe there’s a war on and you get sucked up into it and the world you find yourself in has no axis at all. The sun rises in the wrong place and the little man walking behind the yak in the rice paddy could as well be the enemy as not and there are roads but you can’t use them because the roads are mined, so you hack your way through the jungle and if you’re lucky you won’t run smack into the middle of an
NVN
patrol or get bitten by a mosquito and drop into a coma, and if you’re still lucky you won’t find out ten years later that your own army’s defoliants have made you sterile or given you cancer.

Say you’re lucky and you come out all of a piece. You have a new picture of yourself and you think that’s who you are. You prance around for a while in the white helmet and MP armband, closing bars and breaking up fights and scraping GIs and the occasional officer off the floors of alleys, and then you muster out and buy yourself a suit of civilian clothes and have your picture taken and you look at it and you think that’s who you are.

Then you use your veteran’s points to get into the Detroit Police Department’s twelve-week training course. You train harder than you ever did in the army, tightening your gut and expanding your brain and grinding your reflexes down to a granite point. With one week to go in the program you pose for a picture in your new uniform with the shiny visor square over the eyes and the proofs come back and you lay them out and compare them and you think that’s who you are. But something happens and you don’t finish. Instead you get married and go to work for General Motors security. You’re a family man now and your job is to help push the world around on someone else’s axis. Then you aren’t and it isn’t, as suddenly as finding a note on a kitchen table, and for a long time you don’t know who you are, you don’t even have a picture of yourself. But then someone steps in and shows it to you, and you know better than you ever knew before that this is who you are, know it so well that even when the someone who showed it to you is no longer there, is a bald head and a battered hat lying upside-down in the street, you still know. It’s so simple that you wonder why you didn’t figure it out a long time ago.

You are the one who takes the pictures.

The door buzzer had been going for a while before I heard it. I shook myself loose with a physical effort, stood, took the High Standard out of my left pocket, transferred it to my right hand, and went over to open the door. Sergeant Grice looked me up and down.

“What’s the gag?” he demanded. “I get a call—”

“I placed it. Come in, Sergeant. Where’s Waddell, out blocking his hat?”

“It’s his day off.” He hadn’t moved. The bum scar on his right cheek twitched. “I guess you know it’s a felony to point a gun at a police officer.”

“Here.” I reversed ends and thrust the .22’s grip at him. His hand closed around it automatically and I withdrew mine.

“What’s the gag?” he said again.

“It’s an American trait. Push something at somebody, even a complete stranger, and nine times out of ten he’ll accept it. People who give out handbills find it valuable. We’re letting the flies in.”

He entered finally, balancing the gun on his palm. I closed the door and turned to face him with my back to it. He was wearing a blue wool blazer over one of his yellow shirts and a red knitted necktie. Indoors the milky blue in the whites of his eyes was pronounced.

“So why’s it so important I take it at all? They told me the bum you found had a cut throat. Nobody said anything about he was shot.”

“There isn’t any bum, Sergeant. You knew that the minute I answered the door. I called that in because the bum-killings are your meat and I knew they’d send you. And I wanted your fingerprints on that gun. It’s the one you used to kill Edward Sunburn.”

He didn’t jump or throw himself through any windows. I hadn’t expected him to, really. He said, “I don’t know any Sunburns. And if I was to kill somebody I wouldn’t use no twenty-twos. Department issued me a thirty-eight.”

“Yeah, but cops that kill for a living on the side don’t use department pieces. They use what the professionals use—quiet, efficient guns that don’t make enough noise to turn heads. You should’ve used something heavier on Sunburn, though. Suicides generally place their faith in weapons they know will do the job the first time. And they don’t worry about noise.”

“That’s twice you said Sunburn. Why’d I kill him? I forget.”

“You didn’t go there fixing to kill him, or if you did you wanted to pump him for information first, find out where Barry Stackpole was hiding.”

“I don’t know any Stackpoles neither.”

“You knew him in Vietnam, where your friend Mark Harney got himself fried for doing dope business with the wrong people. You knew him here, when he started looking into that old murder. Only he found a lot more than he was looking for. Didn’t he?”

His face gave up nothing. “You’re telling it.”

“Asking around about you he found out you were part of Ray Blankenship’s murder machine. Maybe that’s the handle he got hold of that opened the door on the whole mess. I looked up your record, Grice. You were stationed in Hue when Harney was fragged there, and back home, before you switched to Downtown Vice, you were a third-grader in the Fourteenth Precinct, where Blankenship ran his contract business. Barry got too close too fast and skipped out until things cooled. He’s more cautious about such things than the average reporter, as who wouldn’t be, given his experiences? You had to find him and take him out before he exposed you as a murderer all the way back to Nam. Remind me to come back to how you found out about the travel agency Barry used.

“Vietnam vets tend to arm themselves,” I went on. “Sunburn kept a gun in his desk. Maybe he had a chance to fire it before you killed him. That was convenient for the paraffin test, but it wouldn’t have been a twenty-two; that would’ve been too neat. You took it away with you to cut down on confusion. If he did fire it, the bullet will be found, probably in the wall behind a travel poster. I don’t guess you had a chance to get any information out of him before it happened.”

While I’d been speaking, Grice had circled the room. I rotated to keep him in front of me. His back was to the front door now. He flashed a quick white grin with no humor in it.

“You spin a good one,” he said. “You’re a better writer than your friend Stackpole. Only that’s all it is, a story. You got nothing to back it up.”

“I’ve got your prints on the murder weapon. It’s empty, by the way.”

He inspected the barrels, saw I was right, wiped it down his pants leg on both sides, and deposited it on the sofa. By the time he had his service .38 out of its holster I had drawn the Smith & Wesson from my right pocket. I gestured at his cheek with the barrel.

“What happened, your incendiary go off before you could get clear?”

“You’re turned around, Sherlock. I got this pulling Mark out of the fire. He was my partner over there. I don’t know how you came up with that.”

“I didn’t. I just guessed. Thanks for the confirmation.”

He moved a shoulder. “You want his killer, talk to your friend Stackpole. He’s the one threw the bomb.”