“Last night’s foggy. Or was it this morning? I thought maybe I dreamed it. Something about a berserk P.I. committing two felonies to spare a friend a night in the house of doors.”
“You got a high opinion of yourself. They weren’t going to lock you in and let me fly.”
“It’s been a long time since I saw you in action. You looked good.”
“You didn’t. You still don’t.”
He passed it. “Is that coffee I smell? As I recall you brew a decent cup.”
“These days so does everyone. Have a seat.” I got up.
“Can I use your phone? I have to call Irene, let her know where I landed.”
“Irene’s smoke, brother. Powdered. Put an egg on her shoe and beat it.”
He got it then. I wasn’t sure he ever would. “Good for her,” he said. “She took a lot more than she had to.”
“Screw that. Sooner or later every guy gets the Irene he deserves. I’ll fetch the Joe.”
“Joe.” He smiled. “Anyone ever tell you you talk like an RKO soundtrack?”
“Old movies talked like everyone else. I just never changed. I’ve got plenty of aspirins,” I added.
“They’re just candy to me.”
I poured two cups black and brought them out on a tray with napkins. He was sitting on the sofa amid the tangled bedclothes. I took the chair and we sat sipping and not talking. If they don’t want to you can’t make them. Ticking, the old clock made a double knocking noise like a man walking with one wooden shoe. It had been the first expensive present my grandfather had bought for his mother. He had given up a new set of wooden wheels for his Model T to get it. I didn’t know where either of them was buried.
My guest drained his cup and set it down with a rattle. He wasn’t any less drunk, just steadier about it. “I think I can sleep now,” he said. “To hell with all this gab about caffeine. It’s just reverse publicity on the part of Brazil, like Hitler burning the Reichstag and blaming it on the communists.”
There was nothing in that for me, and so I finished my coffee and put the tray away and washed the cups. He was under the covers again when I came back through the living room.
“When you want ears,” I said.
“Yeah.”
I went back to bed. I heard him moving around on the sofa for a little. Then I didn’t.
I woke at ten with the sun in my face and no memory at first of what had happened a few hours earlier. I’m not Barry. It came back to me in little polite waves while I was sitting on the edge of the bed wondering what day it might be and if I should dress for home or the office. Finally I decided it was Sunday and shuffled into the bathroom for a hot shower.
When I came out wearing my old house clothes, the sofa was deserted. Barry had folded the sheet and blanket and stacked the pillow on top of them on one of the arms. The stuff that had fallen off the coffee table had been replaced.
In the kitchen doorway I froze at the sight of the scrap of paper on the table.
The table was cheap gray printed Formica over softwood, admirable for concealing coffee rings and setting off notes like this one and others. One I remembered particularly had been written on yellow stationery with a spray of orange flowers in one corner: “Amos—It didn’t work out. C.” There hadn’t been enough words to make it hard to remember after nine years. Just five, six if you counted the initial. Which were as many weeks as had seen me haunting Detroit Police Headquarters, General Service division, Missing Persons detail, until the summons came. Walker vs. Walker. That was gone, but the note was still somewhere in the house, waiting to pop up unexpectedly while I was looking for something else, like a frightening picture in a child’s book that he can’t resist flipping through.
This one was even shorter. It had been written with one of the thick black markers I use for reminders to myself. “Sorry and thanks.” The printing was Barry’s. You learn to print fast when most of your stuff comes in over the telephone and you want to be able to read it later. He had used a white paper napkin that looked as if it had ridden around in a pocket for a while, all sharp creases, with funny pictures on both sides.
6
I DIDN’T SEE HIM again for almost a month. My old angel, Midwest Confidential Life, Automobile, & Casualty, had a lock on my time for most of that period, which I spent babysitting some fairly sophisticated rental surveillance equipment in a utility closet next door to an apartment in Belleville. The woman was claiming permanent disability on an accident involving a top-heavy file cabinet and her back, but you wouldn’t know it by the several hundred feet of film I took of her dancing her way back from the elevators after an all-night date or the eleven hours of taped telephone recaps of erotic encounters with a quality control foreman at the GM assembly plant in Westland. It was strictly leverage. No Wayne County jury in these times was going to find for a Fortune 500 company with branch offices in six states over a fifty-year-old file clerk with a mother in a convalescent home. I was buying my client an out-of-court settlement.
I got a lot of reading done in there with the mops and cleaning fluids and decibel-level indicators, mostly funny caper novels by a writer who thought crooked cops were more lovable than honest private investigators, and the News and Free Press. Barry ran a long series in his column on the lifestyles of various local public servants, contrasting them with those of the assistant administrators who did most of their work, and it got pretty funny, especially when he described the office of a high official and mentioned the new silk wallpaper that couldn’t be cleaned and so when it got soiled had to come down, all several thousand dollars’ worth of it. But when election time came and went they’d all be right where they were now, papering the walls with virgins’ hair or something equally rare and costly. To understand the workings of Detroit’s government in a recession you have to read a book about Boss Tweed with James Brown shrieking on the stereo.
Which was just another measure in a composition as old as Cadillac’s bones. Barry’s writing was getting back some of its old sting, and he had a fresh picture at the top of the column that showed more of his age but none of the fright I had seen in my house. His kind of square good looks were coming back into fashion. There was a cosmetic surgeon in town who had to smile every time he saw the shot. After the explosion he had had to reconstruct that face from photographs and then graft skin over the seams. He hadn’t got it quite right, of course. They never do. It had taken getting used to, like a new typeface on a newspaper you’ve been reading for years.
The owner of the face walked into my toy office on West Grand River while I was filing my copy of the report to the insurance company in my battered green cabinet. He had on a beige linen blazer, fashionably rumpled, over an open-necked champagne-colored silk shirt and gray trousers and black shoes with perforations in the toes. No tie. It had been years since I’d seen him wear one. Ten, in fact. The occasion had been my wedding.
He looked around, at the veteran desk and the dusty Venetian blinds and the mismatched file cabinets and the rug that was just something to cover the boards and the general no threat of an invasion of privacy by photographers from Forbes. “Joint looks the same. The wallpaper’s new.”
“It’s just paper. I’m not running for office this year.” I squawked the drawer shut and grasped his good left hand. He had the kind of grip you don’t get punching keys all day.
“Thought you’d like that one,” he said. “There’s talk of subpoenaing my notes for that whole series. Another grand jury’s sniffing around the City-County Building.”
“They’ll get how far with you?”
“The usual. I’m packing a toothbrush in my wallet these days.”
“What brings the boy reporter out this way?”
“I’ve been trying off and on to call you for a couple of weeks. The girl at your service is quite a conversationalist. Did you know she was once married in Oklahoma?”
“Nearly everyone has been, though not necessarily in Oklahoma. I’ve been working. I do that w
hen I’m not scraping friends out of blind pigs and piling up priors.”
“Must’ve been two other guys. Thirsty?”
“Depends on who’s buying.”
“The Press Club gave me back my card. That’s how good I’ve been lately.”
“Toss me my hat,” I said.
We took a cab to the brick building in the demilitarized zone a block over from the city’s two warring newspapers.
On the way he made a bet with the driver on the Lions in next Sunday’s exhibition game. He knew every hack in the city. I never could figure how he got along in Detroit without owning a car. “What would I get?” he’d asked once. “Chevy? Everyone’d think I was in hock to GM. Ford? Chrysler? The same. I buy a Jap machine and they ride me out of town on a rusty axle. Going public here is like being married to a jealous tramp with a butcher knife.”
At the door he fed his computer card into a slot, waited for the buzz, and led the way inside. He caught me looking around for armed guards and said, “We’re important as all hell, we scribblers. A feature writer gets a coconut bounced off his skull in Beirut Tuesday, and Wednesday the News springs for automatic coconut-catchers. Most of the scoops in here wouldn’t know a satchel bomb if it landed in their margaritas.”
“So they wouldn’t. I didn’t know it was required.”
A kid waiter in a vest and black bow tie showed us to a horseshoe-shaped booth upholstered in red vinyl. Barry handed him the menus, explaining that we weren’t eating, and ordered a Coke. I did the same.
“Don’t do that to me,” Barry pleaded. “You make me feel like the idiot uncle everyone humors.”
“Bourbon and branch, then,” I said. When we were alone: “You’ve been dry now how long?”
“Eighteen days. I started tapering off right after I left your place. You handed me a scare, pal.”
“How is it?”
“Dull as hell. Like going back to black-and-white when you’re used to full color. Most of the friends I thought I had aren’t. The ones I still have tell me they liked me better sloshed. I’ve started going to meetings again, though, and that’s sort of interesting. Sit back and listen to the mating calls.”
“Any of them yours?”
“Not this year. Oh, they come on to me, the divorced mothers who didn’t open a bottle until the kids were in bed and the secretaries who used to come floating back to their desks from lunch. As a snorting hunk of raw masculinity I’m told I don’t spoil too many breakfasts, and women who have given up saucing get that rabbity look, like ex-smokers eyeing a buffet table. But a relationship like that has all the suspense of blind lovers strolling hand in hand. You know they’re going to walk in front of a truck. You just don’t know when.”
“I guess the head still hurts,” I said.
“Sometimes I think it’s what sees me through.”
The waiter came and set down our drinks and went. Barry took the plastic straw out of his and tapped a drop off it on the edge of his glass and ditched it in the ashtray. He nodded at the waiter’s back. “They’re getting younger.”
“No, we’re just pulling away.”
“We’re not even middle-aged,” he said.
“Age is a sliding scale. You want to talk about something or just shoot clouds? I feel like I’m fielding flies here.”
He sipped Coke. He was sitting with his back to the wall, watching the drinkers at the bar making airplanes of their hands and the neat white-shirted bartender sneaking looks at himself in the mirror behind the stacked glasses. “I’m taking a leave of absence starting tomorrow. Six months, maybe a year. Jed Dutt will fill in on the column.”
“The book?”
“Yeah. I need the distraction, take my mind off the crisp clean clatter of ice in a glass. I can do the column drunk but a book is something else. It requires concentration.”
“I guess there are worse reasons to write.”
“None I can think of. But I’m desperate. Also I want to get the thing written. I don’t care if it never sees print, which it probably won’t. Problem with newspaper work is you can never say you’ve finished anything. You settle for what you’ve got because it’s two minutes to deadline—it’s always two minutes to deadline, no matter how early you start—and then you turn it loose and it flutters for a few hours and then it’s something you throw away, what’s that filthy newspaper doing on my nice clean slipcover? But when you’ve done a book you’ve finished something. No one can take that from you.”
“Well, good luck with it.”
He smiled then. It was the old Stackpole smile, folding deep lines at the corners of his eyes. Welcome back. “I wasn’t fishing for platitudes. You’re maybe the only person I can tell all this to without getting dumb questions back like what’s the book about. Come to think of it, for a sleuth you’re not too curious.”
“I’m on a break. Does it matter what the book’s about?”
“It does and it doesn’t.”
I dug out my pad and pencil, wrote something, tore off the page, and gave it to him. He looked at it and I said, “That’s a book editor I met once. You know the firm. You can mention my name if you want. It won’t do you any good.”
“I bet it will.” He put the sheet in his breast pocket. Then he picked up his glass and rattled the ice. “We haven’t done our toast in a long time. I miss it.”
I lifted mine. “Cold steel.”
“Hot lead.” He sipped, made a face, and set the glass down. “Oh, Keith Porter’s dead.”
“Keith Porter?” I was lighting a cigarette. I blew smoke at the ceiling and flipped the match into the ashtray.
“That’s right, you never met. He shipped home about the time you and I got to know each other. He was a cameraman with the Press Corps in Nam. He was in Lebanon last year and El Salvador the year before that, with CBS. All those bullets and car bombs. His wife wrote me from Colorado. He electrocuted himself with a power drill in his workshop.”
I shrugged.
He rattled his ice. “‘The death of friends, or death of every brilliant eye that made a catch in the breath.’”
“Yours?”
“Yeats. I came across it in a book the other day while I was looking for something else, you know the way you do. Can’t get rid of it.”
“What’s it mean?”
“The lights are blinking out, buddy. Every night there are a few less than there were the night before.” He set down the glass sharply. “Let’s go out in the sun.”
I killed the rest of my whiskey and we went out, leaving half his Coke on the table. There was some sun, blinking milk-eyed through shifting thin sheets of cloud. We shook hands in front of the building and I stood there waiting for a cab and watched him step into a parking structure on his way back to the News building. His limp was barely noticeable.
If I had it to do again I wouldn’t let go of his hand.
7
THE LAST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER brought in one of those airless spells we get just before the first nip of autumn, the kind that glues your shirt to your back and clouds the sky with barbecue smoke one last time before the grills go back into the garage under the snow shovels. No one complains about it, much. It’s like an old man cursing on his deathbed. Then one night you go to sleep turning your pillow to the cool side and wake up to find a skin of frost on your bedroom window, and for the next eight months it’s galoshes and flannel. No measure of time seems briefer or harder to recapture in the dead gray of January. But while it’s here you enjoy the women in their thin cotton dresses and that last week of complacent certainty you’re going to live forever.
It was cookie season. The day after I left Barry a man who identified himself as an editor with a local magazine called demanding I investigate the personal finances of a writer who wrote uncomplimentary books about Detroit.
He was certain the writer was in the pay of the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce. I just got through hanging up in his face when the telephone rang again and I advised a woman who claimed her nei
ghbor had deliberately run over her cat to try the Humane Society. She asked if I’d pay for the call.
Two days later a woman in her sixties, with marcelled bright orange hair and blue-tinted glasses, wobbled into the office carrying an earthenware pot with three feet of marijuana plant growing out of it. She said it belonged to her tenant and she wanted me to stake out the empty apartment across the hall until he got back from California and make a citizen’s arrest. I asked her why she didn’t go to the police.
“I went,” she said. “They sent me here.”
“Who’d you talk to?”
“A lieutenant named Alderdyce.”
I doodled a caricature of a baboon on my message pad. “Why not make the arrest yourself?”
“I don’t have time. I have to cook and clean and cut the grass. I used to have a gardener that came in twice a week but I had to let him go. Neighbors complained about his language. You’re not a swearing man, are you?”
I referred her to another lieutenant named Fitzroy and held the door for her and the plant.
The telephone went off again the following Monday while I was flipping butts from my ashtray into the clanking blades of the antique fan.
“Let me guess,” I told the receiver. “Eva Braun’s living in your neighbor’s gazebo.”
“What? Is this A. Walker Investigations?”
The voice was a not unpleasant masculine rumble. I said I was Walker and the voice said, “This is Arthur Rooney of the law firm of Walgren and Rooney. If you’re free tomorrow morning I’d like to discuss retaining your services in a matter involving a client.”
I sat up a little straighter. “I’ve heard of your firm, Mr. Rooney. Are your offices still in the National Bank Building?”
“They are. Sixteenth floor. Can I expect you at nine?”
“Let me check my calendar.” I held my hand over the mouthpiece and blew some loose ash off my desk. “I seem to be free, Mr. Rooney.”
“Very well.”
It’s a strange living. The space cadets are enough to drive you to barber college and when you do draw a sane one, nine times out of ten his story will be so familiar you’ll want to skin Form B slash 27 off the stack and ask him to fill in the blanks. But you sit and listen and try not to squeak your chair and agree that Billy shouldn’t have left home in his father’s Dodge with the mortgage money or that the last people who rented the house on Vernor were insensitive to turn loose a sick donkey on the living room rug and then skip out on the last two months’ rent. You take your money up front like a bus driver and say thank you for coming in, I’ll call when I have something. Step to the rear, please.
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