Every Brilliant Eye Read Online Free PDF Page B

“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
    T HE LAST WEEK OF S EPTEMBER 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 neighbor 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