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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective

Every Brilliant Eye (6 page)

BOOK: Every Brilliant Eye
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“You’ve been breathing that legal air too long, Mr. Rooney. Real people don’t talk around a corkscrew.”

“So
you
say.” He smiled grimly at his little joke. “Well, either way you would have to bring him forward or report his whereabouts. Otherwise a contempt case could be made against you for harboring, if the jury wanted to get ugly.”

I said, “That’s law. You and I both know there’s not much law in it. Anyway, I’ve done jail. I could do it again.”

“It’s been my experience that people who say they’re willing to go to jail have never been to jail. But I think you mean it. If you would arrange a meeting with Stackpole I would consider your responsibility discharged.”

“I set up a meet, you show up with court-appointed officers and park him in protective custody, read that hoosegow.”

He fondled his pen a few seconds longer. The Freudians would have had fun with that, too; they spoil everything. Then he socked it back into its holder.

“I won’t insult you by insisting my word is good,” he said. “Sitting on that elevated seat gives you a perspective on the legal profession you don’t get in Ethics 101. Have Stackpole contact me. After that whatever decision he makes will be his alone. I might add that I haven’t made this many concessions since I last set foot in a courtroom.”

“Welcome to the real world, Mr. Rooney.”

“The one I’ve been living in is no seminary. You’ll do it?”

“I’ll shake it and see what falls out. Good reporters know how to fill in their tracks, and Barry’s the best I know in a town full of Joe Pulitzers.”

He laid his hand on the telephone intercom. “I’ll have my secretary draw you a check. You require three days’ fee in advance, I believe. Maybe you’ll want to give some of it to Dale Leopold’s widow.”

“She married her dermatologist and they moved the kids to Houston. I need it more than they do. It’s just a job, like you said.”

“Helen, make out a check to Mr. Walker for seven-fifty? Thanks.” He pegged the receiver. “I’m glad to hear it. I was afraid you’d be one of these tiresome knights-errant.”

“Knights can always eat their horses,” I said.

* * *

Dale Leopold. Not a big man, but he looked it until you got close, which no one did because he was a little hard of hearing from the police firing range and yelled everything. Formerly Sergeant Leopold of Missing Persons detail, General Service division, Detroit Police Department, retired on a medical because of his hearing. A head-buster from war days when the 4-Fs used to swarm into the beer gardens on East Jefferson and whistle at the servicemen in town on passes in their crisp uniforms and brush haircuts and the squad had to come in and sit on their faces until the MPs arrived. Dale Leopold of the flinty cops’ eyes and brittle gray fringe that ended exactly where his creased brown fedora began. All chest and gut and no hips. Not a nice man but a good one. Two years out of uniform he could stroll into any squad room in the state and help himself to coffee without a break in the conversation around him, or could until Vietnam ended and the rooms filled with ice-eyed young men with longish hair and hard flat stomachs. He’d fit in again now that they were older and softer outside, but inside hard as tile. But he was bones.

I rode down with him in the elevator that day and we walked through the chill lobby and out into the warmer autumn air and got into the car together and drove away from there. Funny how you can love someone without liking him and work with him and love someone else in another way without liking her and not have a marriage worth telling anyone about. After the note I didn’t remember much of the meetings with lawyers, but I remembered Sergeant Leopold in his blue uniform shirt starched platter-stiff, borrowing detectives’ desks to fill out his mountains of forms and shouting in that dead cops’ chant that everything was being done, etc. Catherine Walker, Sergeant Leopold. Five-seven and self-conscious about her height, stoops a little walking, weight one-twenty, black hair, brown eyes. Pouts when she’s thinking. Dimple, right cheek, chin slightly square, white half-inch scar left side of forehead at the hairline. Fell out of a tree and landed on a red wagon when she was ten, Sergeant Leopold, she was a tomboy. Appendectomy scar, right abdomen. Birthmark on her right hip, but you won’t need that in your report, Sergeant Leopold. Nothing? Okay, I’ll be back tomorrow. Thanks for your time.

Missing Persons, with pictures of teenage runaways on the walls, high school shots; substitute a ratty sweatshirt for the ruffled blouse, dirty the hair a little, paint a sneer on the smiling lips—that’s our little Sheryl, Officer. She made the Honor Roll last year. A fat black woman sitting beside a desk listening to a young patrolman with pimples telling her a little boy answering her son’s description just floated to the surface of an undrained swimming pool in an apartment complex in Taylor, the woman watching his lips closely as if trying to read them. The quietest conversation I had ever overheard. Six weeks of that, then the summons, and then the call to Sergeant Leopold, yanking the report. “Sorry to hear it, Walker. Come see me when it’s done. No, not here. This is my last week. Got a pencil?”

A brown fedora lying bottomside up against the curb, a bald head on the asphalt, gray eyes growing soft and muddy in a slack face. Rule One: Never get emotionally involved in a case. Rules Two through Ten: Observe Rule One.

Jed Dutt was standing in front of the elevator when I got off at Barry Stackpole’s floor in the
News
building. He had a lanky frame he did nothing whatever to maintain and a backward-leaning stance that accentuated his slight pot, a tallish man who combed his hair back from a thinning widow’s peak and wore half-glasses on the end of his long nose and polka-dot bow ties and gray wool sweaters with patches on the elbows. He looked like a professor in a small college. He pulled a long freckled hand out of his pocket and laid it in my palm.

“Glad you called first,” he said, withdrawing it. “All hell’s busting loose up here, as when isn’t it?”

I pocketed the tag the female guard had given me in the lobby. “As if I could get into Fort Horace Greeley without calling first. What sort of hell?”

“Heat.”

We were walking down a paneled corridor hung with prize-winning articles and photographs in frames toward the partitioned cubicles where the columnists and department editors worked. Dutt’s vocabulary didn’t go with his place on the Entertainment desk. He had been police beat until the chief barred him from headquarters for taking the chief’s picture dozing on the sofa in his office. Now he interviewed blonde TV sitcom starlets and strung-out forties band singers on tour. Just by way of transition, his first column as Barry’s replacement had been about a crooner in his sixties appearing that weekend at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn who had got his start four decades earlier with the help of a freelance entrepreneur named Willie the Hammer.

The farther we went the noisier it got. A white-haired editor I recognized was standing in the opening of Barry’s cubicle, reading the Bill of Rights from memory and tapping out the punctuation on the quilted chest of a large fat man in a tight brown suit and a gray felt hat with the brim turned up all around. The fat man was yelling something back and waving a folded length of paper while a trim young black man in a Wayne County Deputy Sheriff’s uniform stood off to one side with his hands on his belt, jaw working at a lump of gum. He was waiting for a lull and didn’t look in any too much of a hurry to get one. They had attracted the same small crowd of bored interested noninvolved reporters that a fire in a steel wastebasket draws at two hours to deadline.

I put on my cop’s voice. “What the hell is this? You’re drowning out the presses.”

“Fat chance,” said the editor. “They’re clear out in the suburbs.”

The man in the hat looked me over. His chins were glistening blue and the whites of his eyes had a pinkish cast. He had Sen-Sen on his breath and I could live next door to him ten years and not know him any better than I did in that instant. “Who’re you?”

“My question, friend,” I said. “You’re the one with the lungs.”

“Spengler. I’m an officer with the governor’s grand jury.” He flashed a state buzzer in a leather folder.

I said, “I’ve got one of those too. So far it hasn’t got me into a theater on Gidget night.”

“Private, huh? Well, I got me a court order to go through the papers in that office and take away evidence pertaining to the current investigation.” He got it all out in a breath.

I held out a hand. He hesitated, then laid the fold of paper in it. I glanced at the fine print and he snatched it back. “Looks legitimate.”

“Damn straight.”

“Better let him in,” Dutt told the editor.

“Fucking Democrats.” But the white-haired man stepped aside. Spengler and the deputy rumbled into the office. The rest of us stood at the opening. There was room for only two inside.

“Hold it.” The deputy threw an arm in front of the court officer.

The enclosure wasn’t any neater than I remembered. Barry treated shelves like gunnysacks, stuffing rather than stacking books and manuscripts into them, and the overflow mounded the desk and the packing crates he used in place of file cabinets. A piece of twisted metal the doctors had dug out of his chest after the explosion, encased in Lucite, held down a sheaf of curling receipt slips on the computer terminal that had replaced his typewriter. The same old telephoto snaps of old men named Carlo and Don Cheech covered the walls.

Nobody there was looking at any of that. Those eyes not blocked by Spengler’s bulk were on the two-foot stack of papers and looseleaf notebooks standing in the center of the floor with a hand-lettered sign on top:

DANGER!

WIRED FOR DEMOLITION

A length of flat insulated wire circled the stack twice and vanished into the bottom drawer of the desk.

“Bluff,” Spengler said. “Them newspaper snoopers.” But he didn’t move a grain of his two-sixty.

“Primacord.”

The fat man quarter-turned my way. “Huh?”

I said, “They carried it in coils over Khe Sanh in ’copters whose pilots could set down in a field of crackers without a crunch. It’s volatile stuff.”

Spengler’s little eyes went back to the stack of papers.

A pale pointed tongue came out and slid along his lips. “Aw,” he said. “Aw.”

“It’ll take out this floor and some of the Lively Arts,” I went on. “The book section anyway.”

“What do they want to go and mess around with that stuff for?” His voice got shrill. “Can’t a guy do his work without he gets shipped back in an envelope?”

The deputy lowered his arm. “I’ll radio police headquarters, get the city bomb boys down here.”

“Well, I ain’t paid to babysit no bombs.” Spengler pointed a finger the size of a zucchini at Jed Dutt. “The stuff stays till we get back.”

“Peddle your fat butt, Lionheart. It’s private property until you get ready to serve that order.”

“You got God in a box, smart guy. You went to college.”

The two intruders went out of there on a crackle of applause and Bronx cheers.

“They don’t make them like that anymore,” I told Dutt.

“Only five times a week and twice on Sundays.”

As the white-haired editor shooed the reporters back to their desks, Dutt said, “That sign’s been giving me the willies. I’m afraid to use the office.”

I stepped inside and pulled the end of the wire loose from the drawer. It ended in two frizzed tails of shredded copper, like the ones you hook to the antenna terminals on a television set, which is what kind of wire it was. He stared at me over the tops of his glasses. “How’d you know?”

“Nobody who lost pieces of himself to a dynamite charge is going to be fooling around with Primacord. Can I look through this stuff?”

“We got orders to cooperate. I can’t let you take any of it out of the building, though. House rules.”

“I won’t be able to read all of it here,” I said.

“The line is we can bend all the regulations we want out there, but in here they’re stone city.” He touched his bow tie. “Seen our new copying machine? It takes a few minutes on your way back to the elevators, but it’s worth it.”

I grinned. “I’ll be sure and take the time.”

He put his hands in his pockets, nodded. “You get anything on this would look good in print.” He let it flutter.

“Yeah.”

He nodded again and left me, his rounded shoulders and back-tilted posture describing a lazy S.

I rolled Barry’s swivel around the desk and sat down and started picking through the stack. I wasn’t going to find anything. I didn’t know for sure if the series he’d been working on had anything to do with why he had gone underground, and knowing him I figured the papers were a decoy anyway. If there was a danger of them falling into public hands he’d have destroyed his notes and relied on his phenomenal memory. I was bobbing for wax apples.

Five minutes in I bit into real fruit.

9

I
DIDN’T KNOW THAT’S
what it was when I found it, of course. You hardly ever do, which is why it’s called detecting. Before I got to it I skimmed through a dozen sheets of dog-eared copy paper bearing the typewritten beginnings of several columns, watching Barry grind down the leads to that famous Stackpole edge—he never composed on the computer, refusing to share his dynamite with the office system until it was ready for show—tried to make sense out of his pencil scrawl on some loose sheets torn from his telephone pad and gave up on that. There were check stubs made out to cash in unspectacular amounts, a reminder to himself to buy Irene something for her birthday, random figures in columns; the usual impedimenta of life in an imperfect world. It will take more than machines with memories to make us give up our little scraps of paper. He had apparently emptied his drawers to build a convincing pile for the Spenglers he knew would be dropping in.

When I got to it, it was a three-ring folder bound in slick black plastic with the name of a local heating and cooling firm stamped in green on the spine and cover, one of those things they give you when you buy a new furnace, containing your guarantee and operating instructions and numbers to call when you screw them up. They always outlast the furnaces and usually wind up holding family recipes and newspaper clippings. This one was jammed tight with double-spaced, neatly typewritten sheets. It weighed at least three pounds. When I flipped back the cover, the title page went over with it and I was looking at the first page.

BOOK: Every Brilliant Eye
9.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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