The Devil's Only Friend Read Online Free Page A

such a good man through and through, had brought up in me. But it was no use.
    As I scraped a dull shaving blade across my cheeks, in the mirror I watched the delicate hole where my eye had been. The eyelids opened and closed like a baby’s mouth as I stretched and shifted my cheeks in shaving. What’s it trying to say to me? I thought. I was in such condition that I felt a twinge of guilt when I covered the eyehole with the patch, like I was strangling a living thing. What am I doing? I thought. What am I doing?

CHAPTER 3
    Saturday, April 8
    There wasn’t any elevator. There was a stairwell to the east and one to the west. I always went west because it was the darker of the two and because no one else ever used it. But I hadn’t made three steps downward when I saw the woman and the two children in the stairwell, stopped on the landing below and looking out the window to the street. A slender woman, pale—she turned to stare at me with huge dark eyes.
    â€œYou,” she said. “You’re that Caudill?” She kept a baby crooked in her arm. The infant, too, stared at me with overlarge eyes.
    â€œI’m Caudill,” I said.
    She lunged at me and slapped me a good one right across my face. Even the popping noise it made was shocking. I was stuck there on the tiny landing. I couldn’t even bring my hand up to ward off the blow.
    â€œBringing that nigger up here! With my baby girls in the building!”
    The older girl turned away from the window at the commotion but showed little expression. Her eyes were as round and as dark as her mother’s, and her skin was pale. The baby just stared at me, stared not at my eye as babies do but at the black patch that covered the hole. The older girl stood picking at her fingers until the woman jerked her away down the stairs.
    I guess my cheek must have been red. I was only a few steps away from Mack Avenue when I finally placed the woman: Federle’s wife. It made me wish that I’d locked the door to my room before I left, though there was nothing worth taking or wrecking inside.
    I had stopped at a bank earlier in the week to pull enough cash from my safety box to last me the week, and the folded money chafed at the top of my thigh. When I stopped at a drugstore and took a stool at the counter, I could feel the metal clip rubbing. From the inside pocket of my old jacket I pulled the picture Walker had given me. I thought that I should never have allowed him any hope about what I could do. When I thought of the future in any regard, I saw a blank, a nothing. I could not seem to get my imagination working.
    Someone had written on the back of the photograph in a woman’s hand: “Felicia Downey 1936.” There was an address as well, written in the same hand but with blue ink rather than black. I took this to mean that the address was more recent than the photo. What of it? What could I do? I had sold my old Packard, and to get down to Ohio I’d have to ride a bus or take a train. I didn’t know Cleveland or have any people down that way.
    I stepped into the telephone booth and closed myself inside. It was small enough to put me in mind of a coffin, a coffin too small for my shoulders to fit in comfortably. I went through all the coins in my pocket calling around until I got the number for Hank Chew, one of the crime-beat reporters from The Detroit News. A number of the bloodhounds from the News and the Free Press kept their offices right inside the police headquarters down on Beaubien. They worked through the weekend because it was usually the time when all the raciest crime, the most sordid episodes came to light. There was a general clamor for a bit of scandal in the Sunday papers. I talked the switchboard girl into buzzing Chew’s line for me, and it rang enough times for me to be sure he wasn’t at his desk. As I pulled the piece away from my ear, though, I heard the click of an answer.
    â€œChew,” he