Every Brilliant Eye (23 page)

I introduced myself and held out my hand. “You have a very famous name, Colonel Wheelock.”

He hesitated, then took it. His grip was corded and very strong, but the hand shook a little.

“An ancient war now,” he said, letting go. “Not many of you lads born since know anything about it nor care to. Which is only right. The study of war can have no end but destruction.”

“Clausewitz?”

“Wheelock. What can we do for you, young man?”

Diane gave him my card. “Mr. Walker is looking for someone he thinks may have used us, a Mr. Stackpole of the
News
. I told him he’s mistaken.”

“A private enquiry agent. Well, well. You were in Intelligence, no doubt?”

“Military police. Before that I was stationed in Vietnam and Cambodia.”

He made a face. It was cracked all over and when he did that he looked like the Mummy. “Filthy little bastard of a war. I was over there as an advisor when the UN first came in. I said then it could never be won. The cancer was too deep.”

“That when you got into the safari business?”

“I used to do a little shooting in Africa, but I’m not supposed to admit that now. When it went out of fashion I couldn’t see myself crawling through the bush with a camera around my neck. Now, hunting controls the animal population and prevents mass starvation, but what earthly good does photography do the ecology? So now I send others to do what I refuse to do and it’s made me a very rich man. I’m so proud of myself I could spit.”

“Blood pressure, Colonel,” warned Diane.

He creaked his cane. “It’s hell to be old. I’m not even allowed to get up a good head of steam. I didn’t do business with your quarry, Mr. Walker. My clientele is small and select, read that stinking. If he couldn’t afford to fly in friends from the Continent for a day on Boblo Island he isn’t on my preferred list. Did you know it’s terribly gauche to own a jet? One must charter. Those are the sort of interesting things one learns at this level of the travel game.”

“All wars end, Colonel,” I said.

“The hell of it is the professional soldiers go on.”

“To fade away?”

A smile tugged at the pleated lips. “MacArthur. The old rooster knew his strategy, but he certainly let the Japs pull the silk over his eyes during the Occupation. If only it were so neat as the process of fading. But someone has to stay on to pull out the tubes and fill your veins with evil-smelling fluid and paint your face and say words over you before lowering you into a stone vault so you can’t return to the earth. Humanity is a messy business. I can’t think of one messier, short of fantasy fulfillment, which is the one I’m in.” He thought about it a little longer, then shook himself like an old dog. “Good luck, young man. I hope you find your friend.”

“I didn’t say he was a friend.”

The old eyes sparked briefly. “Didn’t you? Oh, well. Silly old man. Good-bye.”

He turned and walked back into the wall of sunlight, leaning a little more heavily on the cane now, a deactivated warrior with a back that had to stay straight to support the kingsize chip on his shoulder. A hell of an old man. I had never heard of him.

“W
HAT’D
I
SAY?”
announced the cab driver as I got in the back. “But you was in there a little longer than I figured.”

I gave him an address in downtown Detroit and said there was another buck in it for him if he didn’t talk on the way.

“Okay, buddy.” He tucked a magazine with a Centennial Colt on the cover up over the visor, started up, and we turned away from the place where they put up air and sunshine in special bottles and back to the real world.

Hole No. 1 was a challenge the first day out, full of interesting possibilities and the chance to meet new people. It was still that way on the third day if you were young and owned stock in Detroit Edison and Dr. Scholl’s. When you were broke and not young and it was the fourth day it was like shaving without a blade, driving a car up on blocks, shooting blanks at ducks. I had a record of a payment to a travel agency that didn’t exist and a wacky theory about three seemingly unrelated deaths that may or may not have had anything to do with why I was blowing my old age on cabs. I didn’t even have transportation. I was as low as you can get without having to climb a ladder to pull up your socks.

The scenery changed by degrees from gables and wrought-iron fences to six-pack housing tracts and then worn granite making obscene gestures at the sky. I tipped the driver two bucks for keeping our bargain and stepped from warm sunshine into the chill cave of Schinder’s garage.

The German was standing in front of the yawning hood of a two-year-old Thunderbird with a green finish worn down to rust-colored primer in leprous patches. As I came near he took a step backward, wiping his hands on a greasy rag, and said, “Start her.” The engine kicked in with a roar. He listened for two seconds and shouted to the man behind the wheel to shut it off.

“Lifter,” he said. “Number two.”

“Just like Paderewski.”

He turned and saw me for the first time. “How do you feel about manual transmissions?” he asked.

“We’re just good friends.”

“Out back.” He started walking toward the rear. I followed.

From the neck up, Schinder could have been a successful product of Hitler’s early experiments in genetic engineering: blue eyes, square features, and blond hair that was almost white, swept up from shaved temples into a mass of curls. Aside from that he was constructed along simian lines, a long waist and arms balanced on a pair of bent legs with a foot that turned inward sharply. He looked at least thirty years younger than he was.

The foot gave him a rolling gait that was impossible to keep step with. From behind him I asked, “How’s Jock?”

“Not too good. They expelled him from Ferris State for setting fire to his dormitory.”

Jock was Joachim, Schinder’s son. I had helped get him off a Grand Theft Auto charge in return for a lifetime discount on all my auto work.

We went through a tiny office at the back and exited into an asphalt lot with an eight-foot board fence all around and a narrow alley running alongside the building to the street. A row of cars and trucks in differing states of repair stood there and Schinder led the way to an old Buick Skylark with a dull blue finish.

“This the best you could do?” I looked at a parking ding the size of a half-dollar on the door on the driver’s side.

He said nothing, but kept walking to the front of the car and threw up the hood. The engine took up all the available space beneath.

“Woman who had it thought oil was something you put on your salad,” he explained. “We yanked the block and dropped in an engine from an Olds Ninety-Eight. I was saving it for something special. You’re not it. But I’ll lease it to you for a month.”

“A lot of hoses,” I said.

“Camouflage, in case Lansing gets in mandatory pollution checks. Most of them aren’t hooked up to anything. She burns leaded gas. Lots of it. Three-fifty for the month.”

“I’ll go two hundred.”

“It just went up to four. We don’t bargain, or did you forget?”

“Same service deal as always?”

“I make a deal it’s a deal.”

“Okay, four hundred. End of the month okay?”

“Week,” he said. “Cash.”

I put a cigarette in my mouth without lighting it. Wherever Schinder went, the air swam with gasoline fumes. He sweated the stuff. Finally I said okay again.

“You want a test drive before we draw up papers?”

“I trust you.”

We went into the office and Schinder started opening and closing drawers. “Your boy did a pretty good job on that Olds, bled the brakes and broke the emergency shoe clean off. Your tie rod ends were just gone. Must have loosened the nuts. No wonder she didn’t steer.” He found a blank dealer’s license sticker and put it on the desk.

“What kind of mechanic do you have to be to do that?” I asked.

“No kind at all. Give me five minutes and I’ll show you how.”

“Too bad.”

“Had somebody for it, huh.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t like it. Too neat.”

When he had the sticker made out he handed it over. “Life is that way,” he said. “When things get too tidy you want to go out and mess them up.”

“You sound like an old warhorse I was talking to this morning.”

“Which war?”

“Yours.”

“Other side, I bet.” He showed me his brief Wehrmacht recruiting-poster grin. “Keys are in the ignition.”

The motor was as smooth as oil.

I let it out on East Jefferson along the route Louise and I had taken by cab the night before. The lights were with me and between East Grand and Conner no one passed me. When I stepped on the gas the bottom fell out of the carburetor with a noise like lions in a pit and the needle jumped ahead twenty miles. Ralph Nader was going to put me on his Ten Most Wanted list.

I played around with it on the expressways for a while. Wind fluttered through the open window on the driver’s side and sharpened my thoughts, or tried to. I do some of my best thinking while driving, but today my head was full of cottage cheese. At noon I stopped for lunch and dialed my service from the restaurant. I was to call a number at Detroit Police Headquarters and ask for Lieutenant Ysabel.

“Ysabel.”

There was noise on both ends of the line. I stood back out of the flow of employee traffic to and from the kitchen and screwed a finger into my free ear. “Walker,” I said. “How’s Major Crimes?”

“They just keep getting majorer and majorer. When can you get away?”

“Get away where?”

“The Wayne County Morgue for starters. Then we’ll talk about whether we come back here to Thirteen Hundred.”

“Who’s dead?”

“The idea is you tell me.”

I told him twenty minutes and we hung up on each other.

The morgue is hidden underground behind Traffic Court at Lafayette and Brush. Most Detroiters don’t even know it’s there. I told the attendant inside the door I had an appointment with Ysabel and he said the lieutenant was waiting for me downstairs. I found him standing in the little room where they receive the parents of little girls found in dumpsters with their clothes gone and their faces beaten to bloody pulp. It had a table and chairs for sitting in while watching the closed-circuit
TV
screen over the table.

Ysabel was wearing the same colorless suit and tie I’d seen him in at headquarters. Standing, he looked smaller, his large head and broad athletic build somehow out of proportion to his five-foot-six height, but it was an illusion; he was all to scale. A black attendant in a white coat too big for him stood on the other side of the blank screen.

“I’m getting the rube treatment today,” I said, nodding at the set-up.

“New regs,” said the lieutenant. “No one but personnel goes inside. We had a woman freak out last month when she saw her son laid open on the table. Tactful cop, that Cranmer. She may sue.”

“Fitzroy’s Cranmer?”

“You know him?”

“I rattled his cage once. When’s the show?”

He looked at the attendant, who reached up and turned on the screen. It came on instantly, blue-gray with a face in the center, foreshortened a little by the angle of the camera. Waxen skin with a shadow of beard showing under the surface. Damp hair plastered flat to the skull, eyes glittering white semicircles under half-closed lids. Raw like that without music or make-up, it was a sight to make you appreciate the mortician’s art.

Ysabel was watching me. “You know him, right?”

It’s hard to lie while you’re looking at a stiff.

“Yeah,” I said. “He tried to kill me yesterday.”

After a second the lieutenant stirred and the man in the white coat turned off the switch. The screen went very black.

Ysabel said, “Let’s go inside.”

T
HE PLACE HAD A
little lounge for the employees, beverage machines and four orange molded plastic chairs around a folding card table with a blue vinyl skin peeling away from bare sheet metal. On the way there we passed through the room where the corpse I had been looking at on tv was laid out under the mounted camera. It belonged to a pudgy naked body with a trail of coarse black stitches from collarbone to groin and a clear line around its middle where a tight waistband had bisected a roll of doughy fat. The genitals were darker than the rest of the body. Through an open door into the lounge. Ysabel bought us each a cup of coffee from the machine and we sat down at the table. I sipped mine and pulled a face. The smell of formaldehyde and dead naked flesh got into everything.

“The attendants eat their lunch in here,” he said. “Just open their paper sacks and haul out the hardboiled egg sandwiches and start scarfing. I guess you can get used to anything you hang around it long enough. But I had an uncle that worked in a slaughterhouse and hot days he’d start sweating and the house smelled like the back room of a butcher shop. I wouldn’t invite any of these guys to a pool party. I got a pool, you know. Wives.”

I said, “I wouldn’t know.”

“You did, though. You were married. I looked you up.”

I lit a cigarette. It deadened the smell a little.

He drank his coffee. “Kids found the body floating in the Old Channel off Zug Island this morning early. We figure it slipped its moorings in Lake St. Clair and came down river. M.E. found indications of rope burn on the left ankle. No ID, but whoever emptied the pockets was in a rush. Your name and office address was written on a piece of paper in the watch pocket of his pants.”

“Any idea who he was?”

“We know who he was.”

He was looking at me across the table. I glanced around and finally knocked my ash off onto the linoleum floor. It was already paved with burns and old butts. “This the favor I owe?”

“Nope. This is official police business being conducted in an unofficial place. You have to pretend there’s a tape machine and a steno in the room. I don’t get any satisfaction here, you won’t have to pretend. We’ll be at headquarters.”

“We’re all muscle today,” I said. “Must be the formaldehyde.”

“Caffeine.” He tapped his cup. “I’m supposed to stand away from it. But what the hell, I don’t use seat belts either. The stiff.”