Every Brilliant Eye by Loren D. Estleman

cubicles where the columnists and department editors worked. Dutt’s vocabulary didn’t go with his place on the Entertainment desk. He had been police beat until the chief barred him from headquarters for taking the chief’s picture dozing on the sofa in his office. Now he interviewed blonde TV sitcom starlets and strung-out forties band singers on tour. Just by way of transition, his first column as Barry’s replacement had been about a crooner in his sixties appearing that weekend at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn who had got his start four decades earlier with the help of a freelance entrepreneur named Willie the Hammer.
    The farther we went the noisier it got. A white-haired editor I recognized was standing in the opening of Barry’s cubicle, reading the Bill of Rights from memory and tapping out the punctuation on the quilted chest of a large fat man in a tight brown suit and a gray felt hat with the brim turned up all around. The fat man was yelling something back and waving a folded length of paper while a trim young black man in a Wayne County Deputy Sheriff’s uniform stood off to one side with his hands on his belt, jaw working at a lump of gum. He was waiting for a lull and didn’t look in any too much of a hurry to get one. They had attracted the same small crowd of bored interested noninvolved reporters that a fire in a steel wastebasket draws at two hours to deadline.
    I put on my cop’s voice. “What the hell is this? You’re drowning out the presses.”
    “Fat chance,” said the editor. “They’re clear out in the suburbs.”
    The man in the hat looked me over. His chins were glistening blue and the whites of his eyes had a pinkish cast. He had Sen-Sen on his breath and I could live next door to him ten years and not know him any better than I did in that instant. “Who’re you?”
    “My question, friend,” I said. “You’re the one with the lungs.”
    “Spengler. I’m an officer with the governor’s grand jury.” He flashed a state buzzer in a leather folder.
    I said, “I’ve got one of those too. So far it hasn’t got me into a theater on Gidget night.”
    “Private, huh? Well, I got me a court order to go through the papers in that office and take away evidence pertaining to the current investigation.” He got it all out in a breath.
    I held out a hand. He hesitated, then laid the fold of paper in it. I glanced at the fine print and he snatched it back. “Looks legitimate.”
    “Damn straight.”
    “Better let him in,” Dutt told the editor.
    “Fucking Democrats.” But the white-haired man stepped aside. Spengler and the deputy rumbled into the office. The rest of us stood at the opening. There was room for only two inside.
    “Hold it.” The deputy threw an arm in front of the court officer.
    The enclosure wasn’t any neater than I remembered. Barry treated shelves like gunnysacks, stuffing rather than stacking books and manuscripts into them, and the overflow mounded the desk and the packing crates he used in place of file cabinets. A piece of twisted metal the doctors had dug out of his chest after the explosion, encased in Lucite, held down a sheaf of curling receipt slips on the computer terminal that had replaced his typewriter. The same old telephoto snaps of old men named Carlo and Don Cheech covered the walls.
    Nobody there was looking at any of that. Those eyes not blocked by Spengler’s bulk were on the two-foot stack of papers and looseleaf notebooks standing in the center of the floor with a hand-lettered sign on top:
    DANGER!
    WIRED FOR DEMOLITION
    A length of flat insulated wire circled the stack twice and vanished into the bottom drawer of the desk.
    “Bluff,” Spengler said. “Them newspaper snoopers.” But he didn’t move a grain of his two-sixty.
    “Primacord.”
    The fat man quarter-turned my way. “Huh?”
    I said, “They carried it in coils over Khe Sanh in ’copters whose pilots could set down in a field of crackers without a crunch.