A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I think I know which way he ran.”

  “So do I.”

  We shared that through a little humming pause. I ended it. “You go first.”

  He spread his big hands on his knees. “When I was a boy I was too busy hating my father and ogling the women he painted and went to bed with and hating myself for ogling them to pay much attention to the books he wrapped them around. It’s ironic that I spend most of my income filling these shelves. The original typescripts were always coming through here, with the scenes the publishers wanted illustrated marked off for him to read. Booth used Alamo stationery he stole to save on paper. I don’t think Dad ever read any of them all the way through, and he probably threw them out after he got what he needed. The typesetters had copies and no one thought they’d ever be worth anything. If I’d pulled just five or six of them out of the trash, I could sell them now and finance my whole collection. Anyway, I’ve read them all since in the form most people saw them. You can learn a lot about a writer by reading all his books one after the other. Patterns establish themselves. I knew Jim Thompson had an anal fixation before I found out he suffered from severe hemorrhoids, and I figured out Cornell Woolrich was homosexual before the literary revisionists started in on him. Sooner or later, every one of Eugene Booth’s heroes drift up to northern Michigan to think things out in some cheap rented bungalow in the woods. There was usually a lake nearby. He was a Thoreau wannabe. You’ll find him in some Walden up north.”

  “The question is which one. Fleta Skirrett said he liked to fish. Did you ever hear him say where he liked to do it?”

  “Black Lake. It’s up by Hammond Bay. He used to go there to write. I heard him tell my father once he couldn’t write about a city while he was living in it. He had to go where there weren’t any car horns to hear them clearly enough to describe the sound. Of course, that’s when he was writing. He hasn’t produced a thing since fifty-nine.”

  “He’s writing again. His replacement at the trailer park gave me some tapes with his dictation on them.”

  He got excited. His smile went clear over the top of his head and down into his shirt. “That’s the best news I’ve heard since they found an unpublished novel by W. R. Burnett. I’m surprised you’re not halfway up I-75 by now.”

  “He mentioned Black Lake specifically in Paradise Valley, but it didn’t register until I read another book and heard the tapes. He didn’t say which motel. There were probably several of them even then. By now there are dozens.”

  His brow went slick in thought. Then he got up and went to a shelf packed with orange Tiger Books spines, pulled out a book, and removed something in a glassine envelope from inside the front cover. He returned the book to the shelf and faced me, holding the object flat to his solar plexus with both hands. They completely covered it.

  “He sent my father a postcard when he was writing Some of My Best Friends Are Killers. That was in fiftysix, a few months after he lost his wife. I found it in Dad’s papers when I was getting ready to sell the house. It’s the nearest thing to a letter he had from Booth.”

  I waited, but he didn’t bring it over. I sat back and got very tired. “How much?”

  “I want an advance reading copy of the new book when it’s ready. And I want the tapes with his dictation.”

  “I can probably arrange the reading copy. I can’t give you the tapes without Booth’s permission.”

  The muscles worked in his forearms. I couldn’t figure out where he got his exercise unless it was from climbing stepladders in bookshops. “Well, will you ask him when you talk to him? I’ll give him a good price and promise not to go public with the contents. I’ll sign a paper to that effect.”

  “I’ll ask.”

  He came over and held out the item. I took it and looked at it without sliding it out of its transparent envelope. It was a postcard with a canceled three-cent stamp in the corner, postmarked Black Lake, Sept. 12, 1956. The handwriting, in faded brown ink, was Booth’s:

  Lowell,

  Fishing’s good, writing stinks. Thinking of turning my Smith-Corona into a boat anchor.

  Gene

  The other side was a hand-tinted photograph of four rectangular one-story log cabins strung out to the right of a fifth with a red neon VACANCY sign in the front window. A sign shaped like an Indian arrow hung by a pair of chains from a horizontal post above the door:

  WIGWAM MOTOR LODGE.

  “Is it still there?”

  “The local chamber of commerce will know if it is.”

  I fanned myself slowly with the card. I wasn’t hot. My hand needed a cigarette. “Lonely place to go when your wife just died.”

  “I doubt he got any fishing in at all, despite what he said on the card. He probably worked the whole time. The rage would have eaten him up otherwise. It got bad enough later to destroy his career.”

  “Why rage?”

  “Well, from the way she died.” He stared at me browlessly, reading the same empty expression on my face. His goatee dropped. He gathered it in too far and had to work his lips loose to speak. “I thought a detective would know. Allison Booth was murdered. The police never found her killer.”

  9

  Remind me to unload all my stock. When you start looking prosperous, the economy’s getting set to slide the other way.”

  I said, “Now, is that nice? I put on the new suit just for you.”

  Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler conned me through the slight correction of her oversize glasses. She barely needed them and probably only wore them to blunt her cheerleader good looks. This season she was wearing her light brown hair short, with springy bangs arcing out over her forehead. She wore no makeup apart from a little pink lipstick and had on a fitted taupe linen shirt and pleated khaki slacks, huaraches on her bare feet with clear polish on the nails. The unlined charcoal blazer she would wear to cover the holster behind her right hip hung on the back of her desk chair. She was stretched out on the fabric-covered sofa she had finally earned for her office at Detroit Police Headquarters, with her ankles crossed and the Michigan Penal Code bound in red braced on her lap.

  “It’s a good suit, too, for off-the-peg,” she said. “You need a woman to pick out your ties. Red on white with navy is too J. Edgar Hoover.”

  “Is that a proposal?”

  “Only in the ashes of your dreams. The man I marry won’t know a nine-millimeter Glock from a German musical instrument. He’ll buck the eight A.M. traffic on the Ford and come home every weekday at six with a healthy fluorescent tan. Saturdays he’ll burn brats on the gas grill out back and take me to see Julia Roberts.”

  “Sunday you’ll blow out his brains and then yours.” I pointed at the book. “Someone else check out the new John Grisham?”

  “I’m studying for the bar, thank you very much.”

  “You a lawyer? I can sooner see you hooked up with the Poindexter in the chefs apron.”

  “Me too. I just want to look good on the stand.”

  “You couldn’t help but.” I looked out the window. Another stinking beautiful day was sliding in from Windsor. I had no excuse not to make the four-hour drive up to Black Lake. “I need a favor.”

  “Frank Lloyd Wright tie, navy and gray, with maybe a little white to pick up the shirt. You can get it at Hudson’s.”

  “Not the favor. I need a rundown on an old murder case.”

  “Give me a date.”

  “June something, nineteen fifty-six.”

  She turned a page.

  “Too far back?”

  “Investigating cases that took place before I was born isn’t police work. It’s studying history. That far back we don’t even bother to put it on computer. I’m not going to spend all my lunch hours this week fighting the crickets for the old files in the basement. I’ve got allergies.”

  “I’d do it myself if I could get clearance.”

  “Go to the newspaper section in the library. All the murders got press then. They were still a novelty.”

 
“That’s on the agenda, but I need the real details too. Reporters get everything right except the story.”

  “Well, I’m not going to the basement.” Another page got turned.

  “John around?”

  “Inspector Alderdyce is on vacation. You can get a good deal on Florida in May. Next Christmas he’s going to Iceland for the blubber festival.”

  “You’re in a good mood. Shoot anyone today?”

  “It’s still early.”

  I headed for the door. “I’ll be at the library. Call me there if you need a detective.”

  “Let me know if you crack it. It’ll look good on the stats when we ask the council for more money.”

  I took my time turning the knob and opening the door. All I got was the slithering sound of another page turning. I almost had the door closed when she spoke again.

  “Who got murdered?”

  “A woman named Allison Booth.”

  “Tomorrow soon enough? It’s Casual Friday. I can wear jeans and a sweatshirt. It’s dusty down there.”

  “Tomorrow’s fine. Thanks, Lieutenant. Sorry about that detective crack.”

  “Like hell you are.”

  I dropped by the library anyway. Scrolling through June 1956 I got so bogged down by the clothing advertisements and what was playing at the Roxy I almost missed the story when it surfaced on the 14th. Mary Ann Thaler had a Felony Homicide cop’s low opinion of the state of current affairs; one run-of-the-mill murder didn’t command much more space under Eisenhower than it did last week. A woman’s unidentified body had been found slumped in the basement window well of a restaurant on Coolidge early that morning with fifteen stab wounds in the chest and abdomen. She was fully clothed, so rape was not suspected, but there was no purse nearby and her pierced ears wore no rings nor her wedding finger a band despite evidence that one had existed, so the police were treating it as a mugging. She was a tall brunette who appeared to be in her late twenties.

  That was what the News said. The Free Press played it down even more, slugging it in the police column along with a service station stickup, a pinch for aggravated assault, and a flashing in Grand Circus Park. There she was about thirty with auburn hair. Hearst’s Times blew it up to a column in the same section with a strip-joint bust in rural Oakland County and a nasty editorial cartoon featuring Adlai Stevenson, but apart from referring to the victim as “a raven-haired beauty of perhaps 22,” and doubling the number of stab wounds, it didn’t leave me any more enlightened.

  Two days later, when the woman was positively identified, the story jumped to all three front pages, along with a photograph that some enterprising newshawk had probably swiped off a mantel and put on the wire. Allison Booth was attractive, in a well-bred way that would never have done for the women who posed for Eugene Booth’s covers, dark hair piled atop her head bouffant style, high cheekbones, and strong unplucked brows. Her marriage to a popular local author got her a good spot just below the fold, but when no leads developed within a week the item fell back inside, then away. A dismemberment by the river and a scheduled visit by Clare Boothe Luce—no relation—to address the women’s auxiliary of the Detroit Rotary Club took its place. I learned that Allison Booth had last been seen buying a cocktail dress and some cosmetic items at the downtown J.L. Hudson’s the evening before her body turned up. The purchases were left for delivery. She didn’t drive, no one remembered seeing her on a bus or a streetcar, and no taxi drivers came forward to claim her as a fare. The medical examiner reported that she had been dead since around sundown, and that she had not died where she was found, but had been transported there from somewhere else and deposited in the window well. That made it different from the standard robbery-murder, but not enough to give it legs or to prompt the press to demand action when the case dead-ended. Her husband was questioned, but he had been in New York City for two days meeting with his publisher and didn’t return to Detroit until the police called him at his hotel.

  I had gotten most of it from Lowell Birdsall Jr., but seeing it in print made it real, like one’s first glimpse of a painted corpse in a casket. I wound the crank of the microfilm reader through to the end of the spool, but there was nothing more. My watch read 9:40, too late to thread on another that morning. I had just enough time to report to my client in person before heading north. It looked as if I was going to get in that fishing trip after all.

  Hazel Park is best known for its raceway, an oval track where frozen-faced jockeys the size of children bounce on sulkies behind trotters in what is arguably the most corrupt sport after football and the Korean Olympics. At one time it was owned by Joe Zerilli, a recognized member of the national board of directors of the Cosa Nostra. Now it’s split up more democratically among the remnants of the late Detroit mayor’s political machine and the local casino interests. Laying a wager before the comfortable-looking middle-aged women at its windows is not quite as pointless as betting on professional wrestling, but if you Know a Guy who Knows a Guy you can plot out the whole day in the comfort of your home as easily as predicting a Movie of the Week.

  To the residents, the raceway is just a square notch cut out of the city’s northeast corner, to be avoided during peak traffic hours on race days but otherwise ignored. About fifty percent of them have never seen the track. They work in Detroit and fight the other cars and the orange barrels for the shortest route back home and couldn’t care less if they were living next door to a bookie or an archbishop.

  The address I got from Louise Starr when I called was written in fancy script on a simulated board of an aluminum-cased ranch-style house in a neighborhood filled with them off Nine Mile Road. The person who paid the taxes on the place hadn’t gotten the word on how to regard the raceway: A silhouette in black-painted plywood of a horsedrawn carriage decorated the pull-up door of the attached garage and an iron jockey with its face and hands carefully re-enameled pink stood with its fist stuck out at the end of the composition driveway. The bing-bong of the doorbell disappointed me. I’d expected the trumpet fanfare from Belmont.

  Louise opened the door barefoot, in black Capri pants and a matching sleeveless top that showed off the definition in her upper arms. She wore blush and eyeliner, but it took a trained detective to see it. Her eyes were a paler shade of violet in the morning light and her hair spilled like golden silk to her shoulders. Her feet were slender, with well-shaped toes; a rarer thing altogether than a beautiful face. There was no trace of foxglove. She would not apply it at home before noon.

  I said, “Going Bohemian?”

  “Why not? This is flyover country. The yokels never get to see a real live citizen of the Village outside Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” She smiled. “The publisher I used to work for really thought that. To him it’s all crank telephones and Red Man signs west of the Hudson. Actually this is my work uniform. I’m editing scripts. Come in. I warn you, it’s not for the squeamish.”

  The living room was done in shades of white and country blue, with baby’s-breath slipcovers on the sofa and armchairs and magazines in baskets. A braided rug lay on the broad planks of the floor and ducks were taking off in pictures all around the walls.

  “Isn’t it hideous?” Louise asked. “Debra—my friend, the sales rep—rented the place over the telephone from New York, thought ‘Park’ meant she was moving out to the country, and hired a local decorator to do the house accordingly. She says she literally screamed when she saw it, but she can’t afford to do it over again this year. I told her I’ll redo it myself when I can afford to hire her. Fortunately her territory is larger than some European nations, so she doesn’t have to spend much time here. Today she’s in Milwaukee. I think I can find a glass without a pheasant on it in the cupboard if you’re thirsty.”

  “Just water. I’m making a long drive later.”

  She went through a swinging door and I followed her into the kitchen. More blue and white, lacquered pine chairs with hearts cut through the backs and a table draped in chambray with lace trim. A wall cl
ock shaped like a woodpecker twitched its tail to left and right for a pendulum. Louise took down a pair of diamond-patterned tumblers from a shelf over the sink, broke ice out of a tray in the refrigerator, and poured water into them from the tap. The cubes cracked when it made contact.

  “I’ve always liked that noise,” I said. “They really snap when it’s booze.”

  She handed me a glass and raised hers to her left cheek. “They say a person who thinks and talks about drinking when he isn’t actually doing it is an alcoholic.”

  “By that logic I’m also a sex maniac.”

  “I’ve never heard you talk about sex.”

  “Later. I’m working.”

  We went back into the living room, where she sat on the sofa and tucked her feet under her. A stack of loose pages, some rubber bands, and a thick pencil lay on the next cushion. I thought of Lowell Birdsall’s laptop computer. She offered me the cushion, and that’s the last time I thought about Lowell Birdsall for a while. I set down my glass, transferred the stuff to an end table, sat down next to her, and propped my elbow on the back of the sofa. I smelled soap on her skin, a light scent I couldn’t identify. She sipped her water and smiled at me over the glass.

  “You didn’t tell me Eugene Booth’s wife was murdered,” I said.

  She leaned forward to put the glass on a coffee table made from a wooden footlocker. When she sat back she wasn’t smiling. “I didn’t know. It wasn’t in any of his publicity biographies.”

  “It wouldn’t be.”

  “You’d be surprised. I once edited a crime writer whose mother was murdered while working the streets. He had it put on the dust jacket. The book became a bestseller.”

  “People gab about worse on talk shows for a lot less. They didn’t in Booth’s day. It might have something to do with why he sent back the check and left.”

  “I don’t know why. He married his wife in nineteen fifty-four. The things he wrote about in Paradise Valley took place eleven years earlier. He wrote the book in fifty-one. Anyway, all I want to do is reprint it. He doesn’t even have to read the galleys if he doesn’t want to.”