“Just as well. I’m addicted to chewing.”
“Try the wurst platter.”
I left her to her clipboard and went out past a middle-aged couple heading inside with a picnic basket. The woman was reminding the man that this could be Dad’s last birthday.
“Bullshit. He’s had more last birthdays than the Kennedys.”
At the restaurant I got a table under the Hohenzollern coat-of-arms. I was going to order the wurst platter right up until the waitress asked me what I wanted. I lost courage and had pork chops instead, but I washed them down with beer from a bottle with a Valkyrie on the label.
All the way back to Detroit I was aware of the thing growing like a potato in the unlighted bin behind my brain stem. Something Fleta Skirrett had said had fed it, but I didn’t know what. That kind of thing was happening more and more lately. I’d considered taking a mail-order course in self-hypnosis, but I was afraid I’d forget how to snap myself out of it.
I did some business back at the office. The answering service said a lawyer had called to ask me to check out a client’s story. I called him for the particulars, wrapped the thing up in two conversations lasting three and five minutes respectively, typed up my report along with a bill, pounded a stamp on the envelope, and slid it into the OUT basket. There were no messages from Louise Starr, so Eugene Booth hadn’t resurfaced while I was in Marshall. By then the pork chops were making me sleepy, so I switched on the electric fan and stuck my face into it and when I was alert enough to ask questions and listen to the answers I dialed one of the numbers on Lowell Birdsall’s business card. I got a dreamy kind of a male voice that I had to separate from the Sinatra ballad playing in the background. He awoke from his dream when I mentioned Eugene Booth and told me he’d be out between four and five but expected to be home the rest of the evening—Room 610 at the Alamo Motel—and looked forward to showing me his collection. He sounded like an only child with his own room.
I had a couple of hours to kill, so I settled a heel into the hollow I’d worn in the drawleaf of the desk, crossed my ankles, and opened Deadtime Story to the spot I’d marked with a spent match.
Following a number of adventures on the road, some of them in the company of a beautiful female hitch-hiker who happened to put her thumb out at just the right time, the accountant on the run from the mob stopped at a rustic motel in the northwoods. There by the pulsing light of a cheap lamp running off a sputtering generator he wrote a note of explanation to the special prosecutor and wrapped it and the incriminating ledgers in butcher paper. The beautiful hitchhiker, who was staying in the next cabin, had to be persuaded to agree to deliver the package, knowing that they might never see each other again. She didn’t get ten miles before she fell into the hands of the Mafia boss’s henchmen, from whom the accountant was forced to rescue her. At the end, torn and bloodied, he and the woman marched into the special prosecutor’s office, placed the package in his hands, and went out without waiting to be thanked, eager to get to a justice of the peace who would marry them.
It was a tight, suspenseful story, and if the love angle was predictable there was something about the villains, their flat vernacular and working habits, that suggested the author had borrowed them from life rather than the movies or the pages of his competitors’ books. I wondered where in his herky-jerk resumÉ Booth had come into close enough contact with the breed to collect their idiosyncrasies like blood samples. It left me thirsting for more Booth. I saved Tough Town and Bullets Are My Business for later and poked another tape into the cassette player.
“ ‘He was too tired to think,’” he dictated in his scratchy monotone, “ ‘or maybe he just didn’t want to. He drank from the flat pint and sat outside the wobbly circle of gasoline-generated light and watched the moths hurl themselves against the glass as mindlessly as waves smacking the shore. And he didn’t think, didn’t think.’” A bottle gurgled, lips pulled away from it with a kissing sound. “Okay, Tolstoy, you’ve got your beginning and your end. Now all you have to do is write twenty chapters to stick in between.”
I’d been half-dozing, the raspy sentences grinding the edges of my subconscious with no meaning. The drinking noises and the slight lift in his tone when he’d stopped dictating snatched me awake. One phrase had come through, but I’d needed the hand up to realize its importance. I rewound the tape and played back the passage. At “gasoline-generated light” I hit the stop button. I picked up Deadtime Story and paged backward from the end, past the touching scene in the adjoining cabin when the woman clutched the bundle of evidence to her breasts in lieu of the man she loved, to the one in the accountant’s cabin. Once again he grimly wrapped the ledgers and scribbled the prosecutor’s name on the slick white paper in the throbbing light of a lamp hooked up to a generator. There were moths there as well.
The ending he’d dictated wasn’t that much different from the end of the original version of Paradise Valley; the last scene in that one took place in a motel on a lake. He liked to write about anonymous lodgings in remote locations. Someone else knew about some other things he liked. The potato was ripe.
I called the Edencrest Retirement Home and got a nurse who said Mrs. Milbocker was busy at the opposite end of the building. I said I’d hold. I listened to Burt Bacharach for twelve minutes.
“This is Mrs. Milbocker.”
“Amos Walker again. Can you put Fleta Skirrett on the telephone?”
“I can’t, Mr. Walker. She had an episode.”
The receiver creaked in my grip. “What kind of episode?” She couldn’t have died on me. Booth would have scorned to write a scene like that.
“Nothing serious. She forgot she ate lunch and accused a nurse of plotting to starve her to death. She became so agitated we had to sedate her. You won’t be able to talk to her before tomorrow morning.”
“How late is your shift?”
“We’re shorthanded. I’m on until midnight.”
I gave her my home number. She already had the one at the office. “If she wakes up tonight, ask her where Gene Booth likes to fish.”
8
The Alamo Motel clung to its spot on West Jefferson Avenue like a half-dead bush to the side of a cliff. It offered four tiers of rooms exactly the same size, entered from outside by way of elevated boardwalks with open staircases zigzagging between. The nearest thing to a renovation it had undergone in recent years was a brief period during which the M in Motel had been replaced with an H on the sign in front; an attempt to lure conventioneers from the Westin and Pontchartrain hotels downtown. It hadn’t worked, and after a while the M had gone back up to reassure transients they’d have a place to park. Jungle growth sprouted through cracks in the asphalt lot, green grunge and hornets’ nests occupied the brass-plated carriage lamps mounted on the outside walls above the doors to the rooms. That was as much life as the place showed most days.
I parked next to a handicapped slot where a Dodge truck stood on blocks with a young elm grown up through its front bumper and mounted the stairs to the top floor. The original owner’s aspirations showed in the numbering of the rooms: They started on the ground floor at 300, jumped from 310 to 400 on the next, and ended on the fourth floor at 610, where Lowell Birdsall lived. The idea was to make forty rooms seem like more than six hundred. It didn’t stop the owner from going broke when the Edsel bottomed out. The Fraternal Order of No-Necked Sicilians had owned it for a couple of years, intending to run it into the ground and burn it for the insurance, but it was a stubborn organism that refused to lose money beneath a certain level, and they sold it for what they had put into it. Now it survived as a combination welfare hotel for permanent residents and a stopping-place for visitors who wanted something a little more private than the Y but didn’t mind sharing their quarters with a few silverfish. Both the fire marshal and the building inspector overlooked the code violations at the request of the police, who enjoyed the convenience of knowing where to look when the mayor needed a drug bust.
In front o
f 610 I leaned on the leprous iron railing to finish my cigarette and watch the shadows cross the Detroit River on the other side of Jefferson. At that hour the Windsor skyline looked like a row of books of uneven heights and thicknesses. It was the only spot on the North American continent where you could look across at a foreign country without seeing either wilderness or tattoo parlors. I snapped the filter end at the homebound traffic and turned around and knocked on the door.
The man who opened it didn’t look like the son of an artist or a systems analyst or a man named Lowell Birdsall. He was built like a retired professional wrestler going to fat, with rolls of slackening muscle straining the neck of his clean white T-shirt and a dusting of stubble on his shaven head. His ears lay flush to his skull and he had no eyebrows, so that the top half of his face was frozen in an expression of perpetual surprise. A black smudge of moustache and goatee beard covered the lower half. He looked as if he could take me, but he’d have had to climb a stepladder to do it. His broad chest, thick arms, and great muscular thighs belonged to a six-footer who’d been put through a trash compactor.
“The P.I.?” he greeted. “May I see your license?”
I showed him the photo ID. His goatee drooped.
“That’s all there is to it? I thought there’d be a seal or something.”
“That’s Eagle Scout.” But I took pity on him and let him see the half of the wallet with the sheriff’s star attached. He gathered up his chin then and nodded. I stepped around him into the nearest thing to a combination museum and indoor amusement park I’d ever seen in a tiny apartment.
One wall was painted white to set off the art that decorated it. Original canvases and movie posters in metal frames plastered it from ceiling to floor and from side to side, waging a war of primary colors toward a single objective: enumerating the variety of ways in which a man and a woman can put each other in mortal jeopardy. I saw guns and broken bottles, saps and baseball bats, Tommy guns and in one instance a machete, all raised and ready to spill the maximum amount of blood onto the Deco carpet at the base of the display. Red lips snarled on the women, Cro-Magnon brows beetled on the men in a blown-up comic-book parody of animal emotion stood up on its hind legs and wrapped in a trenchcoat or lacy lingerie. A connoisseur now, I recognized Lowell Birdsall Senior’s brushstroke on a couple of the canvases, but the others, cruder and more angular, must have set his son back several months’ pay at collectors’ shows and specialty shops.
It was a hell of a thing to fall asleep looking at, but the pull-down ring belonging to a Murphy bed socketed into the wall opposite said that was how Birdsall found unconsciousness every night. He probably dreamed in cadmium red, phthalo blue, and titanium white.
Someone had taken down the plaster from the other walls, ripped out the laths, and installed shelves between the studs. I looked without wonder at the unbroken rows of Pocket Books silver, Penguin green, Fawcett yellow, and all the other trademark spine colors, arranged not alphabetically by author or title, but by catalogue order number. An additional forty or fifty occupied an original drugstore revolving rack with a Dell Books decal on each of the crossbars. There was a bondage theme on the cover of The Hound of the Baskeruilles. I couldn’t remember such a scene anywhere in Sherlock Holmes. The room smelled musty despite the efforts of a small dehumidifier to slow the decay.
Birdsall crossed the room silently on white-stockinged feet—his loose-fitting jeans, like his tight T-shirt, were white too, like the uniform of an orderly in a burn unit—and lifted the needle from a long-playing record on the turntable of a cabinet phonograph. It was a vintage machine with two built-in speakers and shiny panels of amber-colored Bakelite streaked with black. June Christy stopped singing with a squawk and we were left alone with the hum of the dehumidifier.
There wasn’t room for much more furniture, but it was all period. A laminated table held up a Domino’s box and a glass that looked as if it had contained buttermilk, with three tubular chairs upholstered in shiny red vinyl drawn up to it. There was a loveseat covered in nubby green fabric with gold threads glittering in it standing on skinny black-enameled steel legs and a yellow wing chair with a tri-colored hassock that resembled a beach ball. If a beatnik didn’t come bopping through the door in the next five minutes I was going to be sore.
A laptop computer lay open on the loveseat, looking as if it had dropped from outer space into Ozzie and Harriet’s living room. That would be what paid the rent.
“It’s the most complete collection in private hands in the Midwest,” Birdsall was saying in his dreamy voice. He was looking at the books, not the furniture. “I turned down twenty thousand just last year from a collector in California.”
“Twenty thousand.” There were cracks in the ceiling and I could hear the toilet running in the bathroom.
“What would I do with money? Just spend it, probably on books, and start all over again. You don’t get to own the largest collection in the world by going back to the gate at my age. Do you collect?”
“I’m reading Eugene Booth now.”
“I might have guessed. Read him a lot, I bet. You look like you stepped right out of Bullets Are My Business. Tiger Books, number nine-fourteen. It’s at seven o’clock.”
I glanced at the spine. “I’ve got it. I’m mostly interested in Paradise Valley. Fleta Skirrett told me your father painted the cover.”
When he smiled, wrinkles stacked his face clear to the top of his head. He wasn’t that old; his skin was just dry from rooming with a dehumidifier. I wondered if he ever went out, except to buy more books and launder his whites. “How is Fleta? I had the biggest crush on her when I was thirteen.”
“Most complete in the Midwest. She told me.”
“I saw her at Dad’s funeral. She got fat. Living’s hell. But on the cover of Paradise Valley she’ll always be as beautiful as nineteen fifty-one.”
It was an opening, but I didn’t jump through it. Once a man starts talking about what he likes, you’re in the box with a fastball heading straight for the sweet spot. “Is that why you collect?”
“Partly. Life goes fast. Faster now, thanks to that.” He gestured at the laptop. “You want to hold on to something, and you think if you don’t do it, no one else will. Then it’s lost for good. Did you know that more than seventy percent of the books published originally in paperback between nineteen thirty-nine and nineteen sixty are moldering away, with no publisher offering to step forward to reprint them? I’m more in the way of a curator.”
“That puts you in the arts. Just like your father.”
“My father was a son of a bitch.”
I looked at him. His face and scalp were as smooth as a ball bearing. The smile-wrinkles had left no trace. I asked him if I could sit down. He indicated the yellow wing chair and moved the computer to make room for himself on the loveseat. He sat with his knees together and his hands on them. Big hands, they were; wrestler’s mitts. He must have had trouble negotiating a keyboard with those banana-size fingers.
“He cheated on my mother with all his models. I never blamed the models—brainless creatures, mostly, sleeping with all the wrong people to get ahead. I mean, artists, come on! Nobody with genuine talent has ever been in a position to give anybody else a leg up. They’re too busy looking for their next meal. No, the blame begins and ends with my father. He got so he wouldn’t even bother to change shirts before he went home. Most people remember the smell of their mother’s perfume. I can’t separate it from all the others. She killed herself when I was in college. The state police said it was an accident. She ran her car into a bridge abutment on I-75. There were no skid marks.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “That’s his line, and he never said it. He wore a black armband for a fucking year. It got him laid even more. And the older he got, the younger they got. He blew out his heart at seventy-eight plowing a sixteen-year-old redhead. I didn’t go to see him buried.”
“But you live in his old studio, and
you collect books whose covers he painted.”
“I’m Lowell Birdsall’s son.” The smile he made didn’t stir so much as a wrinkle. “I collect the same models he did, and for the same reasons. The rent’s cheap enough to allow me to do that. The only difference is I just look at them. I’m a virgin, the oldest in Detroit.”
The dehumidifier lapped up moisture through the silence. I showed him my pack. He shook his head again.
“Please don’t. It’s very dry in here.”
I put it away. “I’m looking for Eugene Booth on be-half of his publisher. Fleta Skirrett said he and your father were friends. Have you stayed in contact?”
“Not since my mother’s death, when I stopped going home to visit. Actually, before that. After Booth’s wife died, he started double-dating with my father and his models. He used to drop by the house to visit, but he stopped coming eventually. I think he was ashamed to look my mother in the eye. My theory is he knew my father didn’t care, so he decided to feel bad enough for both of them. That’s why I read his books. He had a decency I didn’t get to see very often. It runs through even his most hardboiled stories.”
“Miss Skirrett used the word decency too. It seems to have been important to both of them.”
“As much as money to a poor man. Writers and artists and actors and models have been looking for respectability since Shakespeare. But Fleta can tell you more about Booth than I can. They live in the same trailer park.”
“Not anymore.” I told him Booth had left and Fleta was living at Edencrest.
“The waiting room,” he said.
“It seems nice.”
“They all seem nice. Some of them are. It doesn’t change the fact that nobody leaves under their own power. She’s a courageous woman. It’s Booth who ran away.”
A Smile on the Face of the Tiger Page 6
