A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I doubt he’ll make it. You’d better give him another day.”

  “Can’t. Couple’s coming in today for their anniversary. Spent their honeymoon in Four. Reserved it for them myself.”

  “I’m headed back that way. I’ll see if I can rouse him.” I still had my wallet out. I kept my eye on the open door and tapped the tin box with the corner of a ten-spot. “Cabin Five,” I mouthed.

  He looked at the door, snatched the bill out of my hand, and turned to run his finger down a bank calendar tacked to the back wall, leaving the tin box standing open on the desk. There was nothing written on the calendar.

  Cabin Five had filled out his registration card in square block capitals:

  ROBERT C. BROWN

  HOTEL MILWAUKEE

  NEW YORK, NY

  He’d written the correct number in the license plate blank; it was the one piece of information the motel people could confirm without going to the expense of a long-distance telephone call. I returned the card to its slot, raised my voice to thank the old man for a pleasant stay, and went out, no richer for my ten bucks.

  Booth still wasn’t answering his door. The shade hung crooked in his front window, leaving a two-inch gap in one corner. I crouched, cupped my hands around my eyes, and leaned on the glass. I straightened quickly and hammered on the door with the side of my fist; hauling back all the way and aiming at the center of a panel. It gave with a crack, the tongue popping out of the groove at upper right. I shoved it in with the flat of my hand and crooked my arm through the opening and undid the latch and then the deadbolt.

  No lamps were lit and the curtains had been drawn over the window looking out on the lake. The room seemed as dark as a cave after the sunlight outside. I ran up the shade rather than wait for my eyes to adjust. The rhythmic movement I’d seen through the window was all I’d had to go on, but there is none other like it. Booth’s body stirred slightly in the current of air, suspended two feet above the floor from the roof’s center beam by his own belt around his neck. I threw my arms about his waist, hoisted him to create slack, and held him with one hand twisted in the waistband of his slacks as I reached up with the other to work loose the buckle at his throat. It took three times as long as it should have because I was straining to support him and the brass tongue was sunk deep in the leather, pulled tight by one hundred sixty pounds of dead weight. Finally I got it free and embraced him again with both arms and lowered him to the floor.

  His face told me I needn’t have hurried. It was gray-blue and his tongue had grown too big for his mouth. He wasn’t wearing his bifocals. His eyes, shot through with ruptured blood vessels, stuck out like eggs. Nothing was happening in the big artery on the side of his neck. His skin felt cool.

  The old man from the office was standing in the doorway. He still had on his reading glasses and was raising and lowering them like someone adjusting a TV antenna to improve his reception. I barked at him to call 911. His Red Wings clapped the sidewalk going away.

  Booth’s belt loops were empty; it was his belt tied to the beam. He hadn’t anything in his pockets except his wallet, a scuffed brown leather number containing his driver’s license, Social Security card, a creased black-and-white snapshot of a pretty dark-haired woman in her twenties I recognized from her newspaper photo as Allison Booth, and a hundred twelve dollars in cash. I returned it to his hip pocket.

  I found a piece of paper containing the telephone number of the Angler’s Inn in a pocket of his twill jacket hanging in the closet. There was nothing interesting hidden among the shirts and underwear in the bureau drawers or in his suitcase or the cheap vinyl toilet kit in the bathroom. He used a straight razor and had a nearly full bottle of nitroglycerine tablets prescribed by a Dr. Henry Goldenrod in Belleville. I made a note of the name, address, and telephone number in my pocket pad.

  A scrap of coarse paper torn sideways from the bottom of a larger sheet lay slightly curled atop the stack of blank pages on the table beside his old typewriter. On it was written, in Booth’s plain hand:

  I can’t do this anymore.

  I left it where it was without touching it. In the distance I heard the first swoop of a siren coming from the direction of town.

  I thought of something then and threw open the curtains covering the window that looked out on the lake. It was the double-hung type, with a rotating latch that slid into a socket when the handle was turned. The latch was in place, preventing the window from sliding up or down. The socket wobbled a little when I touched it with a finger. The window’s wooden frame was partially rotted and the screws were loose in their holes.

  Outside, the grass grew right up to the base of the cabin. It needed cutting. Some of the long wide blades were trampled and broken, but it could have been the heavy rain that did that. The grass wouldn’t hold a footprint.

  I retreated to the middle of the room and stood with my hands in my pockets, looking around: at Booth’s body lying on the Indian rug, appearing smaller than it had when he was using it; at the straightback chair standing at a crooked angle to the door, the way it would have wound up after he stepped off the seat; at an empty bottle on the floor and the half-empty one standing beside a plastic glass containing an inch and a half of amber liquid on the table; at the typewriter, with its wooden case covered in black fabric on the floor leaning against a leg of the table. At first I couldn’t tell what was missing.

  The siren was slowing down for the turn into the little parking lot when I realized there was only one stack of papers by the typewriter. Yesterday there had been two, a taller one waiting to be filled and a shorter one covered with typewriting and emendations in Booth’s hand. The shorter one was gone.

  I went over and looked inside the wicker wastebasket next to the table. There wasn’t so much as a crumple of paper inside it. The only thing in the room containing Eugene Booth’s prose was his suicide note.

  16

  The sheriff’s detective’s name was VaxhÖlm.

  I had to get the spelling from him, because he pronounced it “Foxum” and didn’t seem to care whether I got it right. He looked more American Indian than Norwegian, with a nose that was too thick for sunglasses so that the cushions had worn permanent depressions on either side of the bridge, and facial bones that looked as if they might finish gnawing through the skin any time and poke out white and shining against the dusky pigment. His hair was as black and glossy as any Huron’s. But it was his eyes that settled the question. They were the harsh glittering blue of a frozen fjÖrd.

  He came in just as the uniforms were finishing up with me. They were neat in their short brown jackets and Mountie hats and polite in that detached way that came with being young and relatively new to the work. From the start they had shown no more interest in the corpse than they had to, examined my credentials, asked who I was working for, and only frowned a little when I said I’d have to consult with my client before I gave up the name. I spotted them another five years and an additional inch or two around their middles before they started doing the detectives’ work for them, frisking the bodies and cranking up the heat under the witnesses to break the case on the spot. Ambition in police work comes in reverse ratio to all other forms of employment; later, when just playing by the rules has gotten you no farther ahead than being invisible.

  VaxhÖlm had avoided the five years and the flab. Although he was in plainclothes, there was something of the uniform in the way he wore his moss-green tweed jacket with a shooter’s patch on the right shoulder and black knitted tie on a white shirt with a collar that buttoned down. There was a crease in his olive-drab trousers and he wore brown leather half-boots that zipped up inside the ankles. He carried himself like an athlete, and the thick pad of callus on his palm when we shook hands spoke of quality time spent each week with just him and a handball. His speech was clipped, he bit off his consonants crisply; I thought at first he was English despite his looks until I realized he was controlling a bad stutter.

  Possibly because of that
, he had no small talk. He went from the introductions straight to the note on the table, read it without touching it, and examined the window, again without touching. He left the corpse for last. He stood over it for a moment with his hands hanging loose at his sides, noting its position and that of the chair. Finally he took a pair of disposable latex gloves from a pocket and put them on and sat on his heels and went through Booth’s clothes and inventoried the contents of his wallet for one of the uniforms, who added them to the information in his steno pad. The detective bagged the wallet in a Ziploc he found in another pocket and attached it to Booth’s shirt with a safety pin. He was a walking evidence kit.

  He rose and turned his attention to me. “You broke in. Why?”

  “I didn’t have a key.”

  “That’s the B answer. Why’d you break in and why did you take him down? That’s tampering with the scene.”

  “I saw through the window something big was hanging from the rafter. When something’s hanging you assume it’s a man or a woman. When a man or a woman is hanging you cut them down. They might still be alive.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this kind of thing.”

  “I read a lot.”

  “I thought maybe you were going to say it’s b-because you’re a private detective.” He bit down hard on the P.

  “Finding corpses isn’t in the job description. I take down more affidavits than carcasses.”

  That mollified him slightly. “The deceased was the object of a missing-persons investigation you were conducting?”

  I said it was and gave him what I’d given the uniforms. He’d already gotten it from them but there is no use arguing with cops about the way they do their job. I didn’t say anything about what Booth had told me or the missing manuscript or the man in Cabin Five. That was a risk, because the old man might tell them about the ten bucks I’d paid him for a look at the registration card, but I could always claim I’d forgotten about it in my distress. VaxhÖlm might even believe me. I didn’t know why I ran the risk at all except I didn’t know him or anything about the department he worked for and I wanted to talk with Louise Starr before I gave them for free what she was paying me five hundred a day to get.

  He must have read my mind, because the next thing he asked was the name of my client.

  “I might, if I thought it had anything to do with this,” I said. Then I shook my head. “Probably not even then. Not without permission.”

  The blue eyes got colder, if that was possible. Then he surprised me by changing the subject. “Was the door double-locked?”

  I nodded. “I had to work the deadbolt.”

  “What about the window?”

  “It was locked. I left it that way.”

  “There’s no mystery, then. He was locked in from the inside and we’ve got a note. Some kind of writer, was he?”

  “Some kind.”

  “I thought so, from the typewriter. Nobody uses them anymore except writers that won’t give up. On typewriters, I mean. ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ What do you get out of that?”

  “I don’t have to get anything out of it. My work was finished when I found him.”

  “Maybe he meant he couldn’t write anymore. That’s the main reason writers commit suicide, I hear. It’s what happened to Hemingway. I guess we should be grateful this one didn’t use a shotgun. That must have been a mess.”

  “It seems like a lot to get out of six words.”

  “You’re saying maybe he didn’t write them?”

  “Oh, he wrote them. It’s his scribble. I’m a little suspicious of suicide notes that don’t say anything about suicide. I’d expect a writer to take a little more time with a final draft. There’s no date. He could have written it any time and meant anything. You wouldn’t think twice about it if it weren’t for the body.”

  “If it weren’t for the body I wouldn’t know about it. It makes a pretty strong case just by being here. And he was locked in from the inside.” He had a sudden flash of extrasensory perception. “What sort of thing did he write?”

  I breathed in and out. “Mysteries.”

  He showed his teeth for the first time and I wished he hadn’t. His grin was wolfish, all bottom teeth. “There you have it: a locked-room murder mystery. Only there’s no mystery about it, and no murder either.”

  “You didn’t touch the window lock, did you?”

  “I don’t touch anything until the forensics team’s come and gone. They’ve got enough to do without separating my prints from the hundreds of others they’re likely to find in a motel room. D-did you?”

  “No.” If Forensics could lift my print or anyone else’s off a rusted surface they were better than the boys in Detroit. “If you’re satisfied he clocked himself, I’ll be headed back. I’ve got a report to file.”

  He looked at the cop with the pad. “You got an address and phone number?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, Walker, we’ll send you something to sign. Don’t take your time sending it back. And don’t wander too far from your phone.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant.”

  “Officer. I’ll take my promotion from the county. This fellow Booth have any next of kin?”

  “No.”

  “What about a friend? Someone to claim the body when the coroner gets through with it?”

  I hung back at the door. “Fleta Skirrett. You can reach her at the Edencrest Retirement Home in Marshall.”

  I went to my car and got in. An unmarked Ford Explorer was parked two slots down with a ton of electronic equipment inside. I looked at Cabin Two, my home for the past nineteen hours. I couldn’t believe it could be measured in hours. I got back out.

  A gray Pontiac pulled up in front of Four and a short round bald man slid out from under the wheel and went inside carrying a black metal case. He looked like Mr. Pickwick except for his permanent scowl. The old man and the woman in the fishing hat poked their heads out of the office door, one on top of the other like in a cartoon, then drew them back in. There was nobody outside but me.

  I used the edge of my photo ID to slip the latch on Two and went in quickly, closing the door behind me. The Seagram’s box was where Booth had left it with the necks of the remaining bottles sticking out of the top. I didn’t have time to look and see if there was anything else inside. I carried the box to the door, cracked it to look out, then hastened across the sidewalk and shoved it into the Cutlass’s front seat on the passenger’s side. I didn’t waste any time getting behind the wheel and pulling out.

  If the old man in the office remembered to tell Vax-hÖlm about the box, I was going to get a telephone call. I had a hunch I was going to get one anyway.

  I put eighty miles and two counties behind me before I felt safe enough to wheel into a rest stop and look inside the box. I didn’t expect to find Eugene Booth’s missing manuscript, so I wasn’t disappointed; whoever had killed him and let himself out the window with the loose lock had to have had something to turn into a makeshift suicide note, and anyway I knew what was in the manuscript. I didn’t expect to find anything but half a dozen bottles of a mediocre brand of American whiskey.

  What I found was a very old sheet of eight-by-eleven paper, older even than the Alamo stationery and gone nearly as brown as the box itself, so that I didn’t notice it at first against the reinforced bottom. It started to tear when I tried to pull it out from under the bottles—it was as thin as tissue—so I took the bottles out one by one and laid them on the floor of the front seat. The paper peeled away from the corrugated fiberboard with a dry sound, like a mummy being unwrapped.

  The report, typed into the prearranged blanks, was faded so badly I had to hold it up to the sun to read it. The legend at the top read DETROIT POLICE DEPARTMENT. The date, typed into a blank in the upper left-hand corner, was July 21, 1943. I had to stare hard to read the spidery signature scrawled at the bottom by a hand whose bones had long since been picked clean by sharks on the floor of the South Pacific.

&
nbsp; 17

  I used the pay telephone at the rest stop to call Louise Starr in Hazel Park. I got a chirpy recording telling me I’d reached Debra’s machine and if I left a message Debra would get back to me. I hung up before the beep, spent some more change, and got Mary Ann Thaler at Detroit Police Headquarters.

  “Where the hell are you?” she greeted. “I’m getting Michigan Department of Transportation on the ID. Are you moonlighting as a trash-picker?”

  “I’m calling from a toilet. Did you raise anything on the Allison Booth killing?”

  “Plenty. I’ve been trying to call. You didn’t tell me her husband was famous.”

  “I would have if I thought it was filed under F. What’s the difference?”

  “More column inches equals more paperwork. Same old results: Sometimes you strike oil, sometimes mud. It’s a thick file. I cannot give you all of it over the phone. How far away are you?”

  “Couple of hours.” I looked at my watch. “Say, six o’clock.”

  “I’ll meet you at your office. It’s ten blocks closer to home.”

  I had just enough quarters left to try Louise again. This time when Debra’s machine answered I waited for the tone and asked Louise to drop by the office after six.

  No Ford Explorer was waiting for me with an angry Officer VaxhÖlm inside when I got back to the car. There was no roadblock across the entrance ramp to I-75 and the state trooper stationed at an emergency crossover two miles south didn’t give me a second look even though I swept past his cruiser five miles above the limit. Either the old man at the Angler’s Inn had forgotten all about the box or the unlawful removal of six bottles of spirits from a vacant motel room at Black Lake was not considered worth the gasoline required to bring them back. I still didn’t take a really deep breath and let it all the way out until I hit the first thick knot of rush-hour traffic outside Detroit.