Every Brilliant Eye Read Online Free PDF

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,