Read Online Every Brilliant Eye by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online

keister.”
    “It’s that pressure on the brain.” We stopped at the machine and he watched me lower my coat carefully to the floor before laying the clippings face down on the glass cover. “That knob controls the number of copies. Just push the button when you’re ready to print.”
    “Thanks.
    “And you better carry that stuff you’re hiding out in the open when you pass Lady Patton in the lobby. Otherwise she’ll call out the troops.”
    I looked at him.
    “I got off police beat just in time,” he said, with his shy grin. “When you start to think like a cop it’s time for a change.”
    He left me. I stood there for a moment rubbing the back of my neck. Then I started twisting knobs and pressing buttons. There was something to be said for not being in show business while Jed Dutt was on the Entertainment desk.
    The building wino was using the upholstered bench in my waiting room to kill a fifth of Annie Greensprings. He was a gray-stubbled black man who wore a blue knit cap and brown jersey gloves with the fingers out and an olive-drab army overcoat the year around, which was okay because I was pretty sure he didn’t wear anything underneath. I didn’t ask him how many customers he’d scared off while he was sitting there. He wouldn’t have remembered anyhow. “Out,” I said. “There’s an astrologer next door. You can gaze at the chart of Venus and plan your next vacation.”
    He got up, looking at me with glistening spaniel eyes, and shuffled toward the door I held open. He smelled of dago red and a stopped-up toilet. When he was almost in the hall I said oh hell, clawed out my wallet, and jammed a five-spot into his slash pocket. The look it bought wasn’t worth it. It never is.
    Inside the cloister I picked up my mail and went over to the desk and boomed down my armload of papers and skinned through the envelopes. I was very popular with Publishers Clearing House and the Readers Digest, and the quick-print place I had do my business cards and letterheads had sent me a 5 x 7 greeting card with a cartoon of a chicken being held upside-down by a hairy fist clamped around its legs and the message inside: “ Now will you pay?” I peered at the fine print on the back. It wasn’t a Hallmark so I filed it under the blotter with the others.
    I hung up my coat, which was showing wear from all the carrying around, and took my seat behind the desk, dialing my answering service as I shuffled through the newspaper clippings I’d copied at the News. Two of the pieces, dated several months apart, were about bodies found in the trunks of cars parked at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. They could have been connected. They could just as easily not have been. One good way to relieve traffic congestion at the airport would be to direct the cars with stiffs in them to their own part of the lot: Visitors, Passengers, Corpses. There was an article about a Detroit police inspector taking early retirement after eighteen years with the department, dated last January, a long Sunday magazine profile of a local labor union chief, dead two years, and a scattering of three-inch fillers on various assaults, shootings, and hits-and-runs in the metropolitan area. A five-year record of random violence with nothing but a manila folder in common. On the face of it.
    “Just one message, Mr. Walker,” said the girl at the service. “From a Lieutenant Fitzroy at police headquarters.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Something about an old lady and a marijuana plant. It’s rather involved.”
    I grinned. “Thanks. I can figure it out.”
    After hanging up I puzzled over the clippings a little longer, arranging the white copy sheets side by side on the desk. Then I tried shuffling them, but that didn’t light any bulbs either. Finally I restacked them and slipped a paper clip over one corner and put the sheaf in the drawer with the brass knuckles and my diploma from the Willie Sutton School of Dance. I lit a cigarette and pulled over