A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You’re saying what you wrote wasn’t what happened.”

  “You’re a detective. That you are.” He swallowed.

  Rain clobbered the windowpane, the only sound. He’d either changed his mind about talking or had lost his train. I was about to introduce a new subject and work our way back when he went on. He’d fallen into the grating drone of the tapes.

  “When I close my eyes I can still hear Duane telling it, just the way he told it to our mother and me in the dining room of the old place on Kercheval late that Monday night and never told it to anyone afterwards. Guess that’s why I don’t like closing my eyes for too long at a stretch. Everything happened just the way the papers said and the way I put it in the book, except for one detail. It wasn’t Clifford who got knocked cold. It was Duane Adam Booth, his partner. And it wasn’t a rock. It was the butt of Clifford’s service revolver. He used it when Duane went for his own to push back the crowd. The three poor bastards were dead when my brother woke up.”

  “Clifford turned them over?”

  “I doubt he wanted to. He was probably a bigot— everyone was, then—but he was no killer. He was just yellow, and a better mathematician than my brother. It was two against a couple of dozen and he turned coat to save his own skin; try translating that for the foreign market. Fortunately I didn’t have to worry about it. I wrote it straight from the official police report. The one Clifford filed and Duane signed.”

  “Why? Start with Duane.”

  “Why did he sign it? It wasn’t his first choice. He wrote a different report separately, then tore it up. His partner made it clear that if he went down, he wouldn’t go down alone. None of the members of the mob that lynched those men was going to come forward and back Duane up.”

  “Still, it was just Clifford’s word against his.”

  “Clifford had friends. He retired a full commander after twenty-five years with the department. Even a coward who gets to pose as a hero doesn’t rise that far on reputation alone. The reputation was useful, maybe crucial, but it would’ve blown over in a year without someone in a position to nail it down every time the promotions list went up.”

  “City hall?”

  “Don’t be naive. What’s city hall got to gain from a cop with gratitude? Who’s left? Think.”

  “Oh, them.” I emptied my glass. “It always seems to come down to them no matter what.”

  “The price of liberty is eternal corruption. Ask Russia.” Liquid splashed in the dark. “Duane wasn’t around to do it—he enlisted rather than spend the rest of his career telling the same old lie, then got killed—so I made Roland Clifford my hobby. For years I kept a scrapbook, starting with the riot piece.

  “I don’t know even now if the boys in the tight jackets had their teeth into him from the start or if they smelled money and swam in later. Whatever else you say about them, you can’t say they don’t learn from their mistakes. They got rich from Prohibition, then blew most of their profits lobbying against Repeal. It took ten years to regain their momentum. Then came the wartime black market. They turned meat and eggs and cigarettes and tires into cash, tons of it, but they knew the war couldn’t last forever. When Roosevelt and Churchill met Stalin at Yalta, the Detroit boys held their own summit.”

  He stopped to light a cigarette. Twin match-flares crawled on the lenses of his glasses. I almost jumped. In the dark I’d half convinced myself I was listening to his canned dictation.

  “They drew up a plan to divert their gains into postwar rackets.” He shook out the flame. “Gambling, unions, prostitution, entertainment. They needed protection from the law, so they bought it. Clifford was a sergeant when the war ended. A week after V-J Day he was promoted to the plainclothes division. The city averaged a dozen raids per election year, complete with front-page pictures of cops loading whores into paddy wagons and smashing one-arm bandits and posing behind tables covered with betting slips and cash. Sergeant Clifford managed to appear in all of them. The amount of money confiscated barely covered the cost of the raids. The people who went to jail were strictly blue collar: pavement princesses and pugs, door openers. Nobody important. The cash registers were chiming again next weekend.”

  “That doesn’t prove Clifford tipped them,” I said.

  “I don’t have proof for any of this. We’re just two guys talking in the dark.”

  “I’ll drink to the dark.” I poured. “You’ve already told me more than you told Fleta Skirrett.”

  “You talked to Flea?” He chuckled, coughed. Sparks sprayed. He cursed and brushed them off. “I bet she told you she slept with Pollock.”

  “She said Dali. But she wasn’t sure it was him.”

  “She doesn’t know who she slept with last week, or if she slept with anyone ever. She’s as nutty as a pup chasing its tail. Always was. The Alzheimer’s is just an excuse. Good old Flea. She’s the only one from back then I’d care to spend time with. Pink birthday candle in a cave, that’s her. Doesn’t light anything but itself, but looking at it takes your mind off the cave.”

  “What kept you from writing Paradise Valley the way Duane told it?”

  “Life. It’s overrated, let me tell you. Oh, I was hot to write the truth at first, but truth won’t carry a book if you don’t know how to tell it. I was a kid, and I had my mother to support after Duane died. Well, if you read my books, you saw the resumÉ. I hacked for newspapers, sold chainsaws and flowers, stood in for a punching bag down at the gym until the real sparring partners came back from the war, fifty cents a day and they threw in the iodine free. I changed oil, killed cockroaches, stunned cattle, and found out some things you don’t want to know about what goes on in the back rooms of mortuaries. Just about the time I’d lived enough to write, Harry Truman tagged me for Korea.

  “Korea,” he repeated quietly; the storm was out over Lake Huron now and the wind had died to a whimper. “I found out something my brother never knew, about combat, and how you never kill a man without something in you curling right up with him. That was like losing Duane all over again. It was the same when I celebrated my forty-first birthday and realized my father never made it that far. Anyway the truth didn’t seem so important after Korea. It wouldn’t bring Duane back and, worse, it wouldn’t sell. People wanted heroes. I gave them one in Paradise Valley and they lapped it up. Deadtime Story, Tough Town, Bullets Are My Business—three more books, three more heroes. They sold like candy. I bought Mom a new house in Royal Oak. I met Allison and got married and moved out of the Alamo. Mom died after two years in the new place. I found out she’d put some things in storage that had belonged to my brother and I went over and claimed them.”

  The red eye of his cigarette brightened as he drew on it, then made an arc down to the ashtray. He thumped it out.

  “How about you, Walker?” he said then. “Any brothers or sisters? Kids?”

  “None of each.”

  “It’s a bitch being the last of your line. I’d found out by then Allison couldn’t have children. I didn’t much care for them—little larval human beings, raise them as right as you know and then they turn on you and blame you for what rotten adults they turned out to be. Not the point. I looked at that pathetic pile of stuff that was all that was left of Duane: track trophies, term papers, junk from his police locker, the usual mess of compost; and I wondered if a stack of cheap books was all my life was worth and if it was worth even as much as that crap of Duane’s.

  “We didn’t have the phrase ‘midlife crisis’ then,” he said. “I might’ve laughed it off if we had. Nothing burns my butt worse than a clichÉ. What I did was get drunk. I stayed that way for fifteen years.”

  The overcast was wearing thin. Watery gray light gleamed on the lake and picked up the broken boughs and other trash that had collected outside. A soaked green-and-white patio umbrella stuck upside-down in the grass like a broken harpoon.

  “So you went off on a bat,” I said. “I’d say you were entitled. I don’t know about the fifteen years.”

>   “It’s not them I’m curious about. I’ve got a clearer picture of them than I care to have. It’s the first few weeks I can’t call up. God knows who I talked to in that time and what I said. Whatever it was it got my wife killed.”

  15

  The sun was back in place now. A pine bough, heavy with water and brushing the window, glittered with droplets like bits of broken glass left behind at the scene of a traffic accident. The lake was still choppy, with white foam frosting the waves, but as I watched, its color went from tarnished silver to bright sapphire. It was light in the room too. Eugene Booth sat with his hand wrapped around his glass, his feet in their heavy lace-up shoes flat on the rug, and the back of his head resting in a hollow in the upholstery that had been worn by a hundred other heads. His eyes were open.

  “The police said your wife was killed during a mugging,” I said.

  “I’ve spent most of the last forty years telling myself they were right. It would’ve been easier if I didn’t know what I know about the police.” He turned the glass around in his hand, working it with his thumb. “Don’t get me wrong. Most of the time they do a good job. When they don’t, it’s usually because someone won’t let them or they’re too busy with other things. Her purse and jewelry being missing gave them an easy out. You can’t blame them for taking it. I wouldn’t blame them if I didn’t think it was in someone’s best interest not to blame them for taking it.”

  “Someone being Sergeant Roland Clifford.”

  “He was a lieutenant then at headquarters. But I don’t think it was him. The only thing he ever did on his own initiative was brain my brother with his revolver. From that point on he never had to make a decision for himself.”

  “What made your wife worth killing? If you were drunk and shooting your mouth off about what happened in forty-three, you were the obvious candidate.”

  “That’s the point. If there’s anything the fuckers learned from Prohibition, it’s to avoid being obvious. I was a famous character by fifty-six. If it was my corpse stuck in that window well there would’ve had to be an investigation. They’d have had to throw someone to the wolves. Why risk it, if by taking out Allison they could put a cork in me just as tight as if they’d killed me? The joke was on them, though. I was more determined than ever to write the truth. That’s when New York stepped in on their side.

  “Some of My Best Friends Are Killers is about a police cover-up,” he said. “I wrote most of it right here at the Wigwam. It might have been this cabin, although I think it was Number One, the one that burned down later. Did you say you read it?” He’d forgotten our earlier conversation.

  “Not yet. I asked Louise Starr to send me a copy.”

  “Read Steinbeck instead. By the time it came out it was about one crooked cop and an honest police department that united against him when the hero presented it with the evidence. The cop didn’t bear even a passing resemblance to Clifford. That editor I knocked out later talked me into watering it down; Legal was afraid of a lawsuit and Marketing said the book would just upset readers. Legally and commercially they were right. By then I was tired of grieving, tired of being angry. I’d discovered a sure-fire cure for hangover, which is to stay drunk. I caved. I rewrote it. I can’t blame anyone for that but me. I never thought I could hate anybody more than I hated Roland Clifford. As usual I was wrong. He was a yellow son of a bitch but he was never as yellow as Duane Booth’s little brother Eugene. I didn’t even have an angry mob as an excuse. I was afraid of not being a success.”

  He tilted his head forward. His voice deepened:

  “ ‘There once was a lady from Niger

  who went for a ride on a tiger.

  They returned from the ride

  with the lady inside

  and a smile on the face of the tiger.’ “

  He laughed, coughed, drained his glass, and filled it again. The ice cubes had melted and he was drinking eighty proof.

  “Freud was right,” he said. “The more you fear something the more likely you are to bring it about. Killers tanked. Not because it was watered down, but because there was still too much whiskey in it. It was the first book I ever wrote drunk. It sure as hell wasn’t the last. The last was Concerto for Cutthroats. I never even read it myself. Tiger Books wouldn’t have brought it out at all except it was the last one I owed them on my contract and it gave them an excuse to get rid of me. It sold like anvils. Nobody else would sign me after that. The rest you know.” He grinned baggily. “You like that? That’s the first time anyone ever delivered that line outside of a book or a movie. Consider it your going-away present.” He put down his drink in two draughts and got up. He stumbled and caught himself on the iron railing at the foot of the bed. The empty glass thudded to the plank floor and rolled around in a half circle. I got up to give him a hand, but he waved it off. He straightened himself with a hissing intake of breath, found the door, and went that way.

  “So now you’re writing Paradise Valley the way you wanted to before you went to Korea,” I said. “That’s why you sent back Louise’s check.”

  “Yeah. Big-ass deal. Everybody’s dead. Call it the last irrelevant act of a useless fucking life. Put that on my tombstone and piss on it.” He groped for the knob, got it on the second pass, and went out, lifting his feet over the threshold as if it were two feet high. I stepped out after him and leaned on the doorframe until I saw he’d made it into his cabin.

  Just then the lights came on in mine. I went back in and switched them off. He’d left his case of whiskey. I picked up my glass, which was still half full, but I didn’t drink it. I went into the bathroom, wobbling on round heels, and dumped it out in the sink. I splashed my face with cold water—it was rusty and stank of sulphur, the electric pump having just kicked back on—then wobbled back out and threw myself on the bed. I had to put one foot on the floor to avoid riding the mattress. I hadn’t been that drunk at that hour of the morning since college. I decided I hadn’t the liver to be a writer.

  I woke at noon, checkout time. My head was banging like a sheet of tin in a high wind. I killed the little travel bottle of aspirins, chased them with rusty water, and packed. That took two minutes since I hadn’t taken anything out except my toilet kit and the clothes I’d worn. Oh, and the Chief’s Special; I remembered it behind the radiator and put it in the bag. The shirt and jeans I’d had on that morning were still wet, so I rolled them into a bundle and stuck it in the plastic sack that had lined the wastebasket. When I had everything loaded in the car I went back in and looked at the case of Seagram’s.

  I doubted he was in shape to answer his door. My job was finished, I’d found Booth and learned why he’d sent back the check. He was good for three or four more hours of oblivion and I needed the drive time more than I needed to say good-bye. But he’d be sore as hell if I left the whiskey as a tip for the maid.

  Three knocks, five knocks, shave-and-a-haircut; none of the codes worked. Pounding just confirmed how really cheesy the door panels were. I gave up and walked down to the office.

  Someone was watching the news in the little room off the desk. The announcer was warning people not to touch power lines they found lying on the ground. A bony male party of about the same vintage as the woman who had checked me in was reading a water-damaged copy of Sports Illustrated in the captain’s chair on the customer side of the desk when I came in. He glanced up over his half-glasses, put down the magazine, and heaved himself to his feet with enough force to lift a man twice his size; the heavy soles of his Red Wing shoes seemed to be the only thing that kept him from going through the ceiling. He went around a plastic bucket catching the water from a leak in the roof, got himself behind the desk, caught the key to Cabin Two on the first bounce, and looked me up in the tin box. He had on a white shirt and shapeless green slacks, no fishing gear, and combed his thin white hair sideways across his dry pink scalp. The nosepiece of his glasses cut into the skin of his great pink beak like baling wire.

  “Oh, Walker,” he said. “P
ackage came for you this morning. Special delivery.”

  I looked at the padded six-by-eight envelope he placed on the desk. It had a New York City return address. It would be the copy Louise had promised me of Some of My Best Friends Are Killers.

  It reminded me of the New York plates on the GMC pickup. I signed the receipt he handed me for the room and gave him back his copy. “What time did Cabin Five check out last night?”

  I expected the lecture on the sanctity of the guests. Instead he said, “Cabin Five,” licked a thumb, and went through the plastic dividers in the box until he came to it. “Receipt’s still here. Guess he just left.”

  “That happen often?”

  “Often enough to make us ask for cash in advance. Some folks are in a hurry, just leave the key in the cabin and take off.”

  “Ferris, you gossiping about the guests?” The old woman’s voice rose above the TV announcer’s.

  “I’m telling him all about the orgy in Five.” He pronounced it with a hard g. “Wimmen and likker and Mary Jew Wanna all night long. I think it was a rock group we had in there.”

  “No one’s laughing, Ferris. Don’t you go gossiping about the guests.”

  Ferris lowered his voice. “No one’s laughed in thirty-six years. I was better off married to my dead first wife.”

  I grinned. “There’s a box in Two belongs to the man in Four. You’d better give it to him when he wakes up.” I put a five-dollar bill on the desk.

  He glanced toward the open door, then folded the bill one-handed and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Four? He’s checking out today, I think.” he pulled Booth’s card. “Yep. He’s late.”