A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Trying to magnetize the tobacco. The limerick goes something something ‘ride on a tiger.’ ”

  “It would have to. Is it a static electricity thing?” She was watching the cigarette.

  “Search me. I’m trying to tell you about this limerick.”

  She flicked her nails at the back of my hand and I withdrew it. She stared at the cigarette for a moment, then traced an index finger around it slowly. On the second pass she picked up the pace, tightening the circle. By the fifth lap the movement was a blur. On the seventh and eighth she slowed down. The tenth time around, the cigarette twitched. Twice more and then it revolved in a full circle, following her finger as if it were attached with an invisible filament.

  She got up. “Keep the file. If anyone asks for it they won’t be expecting it right away. I’ll call you if I need something I haven’t already committed to memory. Don’t forget my number if you raise anything on your end. Right, the limerick. I don’t see much point to it if the lady doesn’t wind up inside the tiger.”

  She left while I was rising to open the door for her.

  I got there in time to hold it for Louise, who drifted in carrying a folded copy of the Free Press under one arm. She glanced back toward the hall door. “Interesting woman. I offered her a chance to write her memoirs. Women doing traditional men’s jobs is a good market.”

  “She isn’t a writer.”

  “These days that doesn’t matter. There are plenty of talented writers out there who are willing to ghost.” She looked around. “Same charming office. Gene Booth would approve.”

  “Sorry I kept you waiting.”

  “That’s all right. I took the liberty of reading your paper. Debra subscribes to USA Today. That news I can get from the TV networks.” She put the newspaper on the desk and let me pull the chair out for her. “I see you don’t keep it bolted to the floor anymore.”

  “Some of my clients don’t use mouthwash. But a lot of them feel more comfortable if they can push up close and whisper.” I took my seat. It was uncomfortably warm from my own body heat and I turned the fan up another notch. “Have you been taking in the sights?”

  “You mean the casinos? Are they open?”

  “Not yet. The MGM Grand is renovating the old IRS building.”

  “Appropriate. I do want to check out Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum.”

  “Don’t try to do both in one day. The Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop and the chair Lincoln was shot in is too much history all at once.”

  “Small talk.” She smiled. “The news must be bad.”

  “Uh-huh.” I picked up the magnetized cigarette and plunked it into the wastepaper basket. Then I folded my hands on the blotter. That made me feel like an undertaker so I rested them on the arms of the swivel. “Booth is dead. I found him this morning hanging in Cabin Four at the Angler’s Inn.”

  One hand went halfway to her mouth. Then it drifted down and found the other one in her lap. “Oh, dear God. Suicide? No, what a ridiculous question to ask. Of course it was suicide. The poor man.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “He was old and miserable and sick. He told me the first time we spoke he had a bad heart. It seemed likely. Do you mean it wasn’t?”

  I’d been a detective too long. For the smallest piece of a second a light showed in her eyes. It didn’t have to mean anything. It could have been the sheen of tears.

  I ran a test. “You could get a book out of it I suppose. But you’d need a murderer. Otherwise it’s a long joke without a punchline. Anyway, who would you get to write it, one of your ghosts?”

  The delicately chiseled face went stony. “That’s a despicable thing to say.” Her tone was barely audible.

  “I’m the one who took him down.”

  “I’m sorry.” She looked it.

  “Me too.” I stirred myself finally and opened the file drawer at the bottom of the desk. “Scotch is all I have. I’m sorry about that too. You’re welcome to join me.” I stood the bottle on the desk and the two shot glasses I kept for genteel company. It was the good brand I’d bought out of the spring’s largesse. Spring seemed a long time ago.

  “Thank you, I will.”

  I poured hers first and then mine. I didn’t propose a toast out of respect for the deceased. Bullshit, he’d said, the one time I asked. I wanted to put mine down in one easy deposit, but I made myself sip it. The sip Louise took was healthier than expected. It brought a flush to her smoothly tanned cheeks.

  “Tell me all of it,” she said.

  I told her all of it, including the part I hadn’t told Lieutenant Thaler. When I finished she was thinking like a publisher. I decided I hadn’t misinterpreted what I’d seen before, but what the hell. The Scotch was already working. It paid to buy the best.

  “Do you think this Robert Brown did it?” she asked. “He’s a mobster?”

  “If he is his name isn’t Brown. It probably isn’t anyway. This year’s Robert Brown is last year’s John Smith. I’d need a lot more help than you could afford to look them all up, even if I confined myself to New York State, and then he wouldn’t be one of them. I’m having his plate run but that will be a dead end too. If it isn’t he’s probably innocent. If all my hunches played out I’d be down at the Grand now, waiting for the doors to open.”

  “It had to be murder. If it wasn’t, the manuscript would have still been in his cabin.”

  “The manuscript didn’t mean anything. He was writing fiction. It wouldn’t hang anyone without proof. If he was killed and the killer took it, it would just be to satisfy someone’s curiosity about what Booth knew. It wasn’t worth killing for.”

  “Duane Booth’s original police report would be, though. That’s why he put it in your cabin. He must have known his life was in danger.”

  “Only an idiot doesn’t,” I said. “He told me his brother destroyed the report and signed his name to Roland Clifford’s. He hadn’t made his mind up about me yet. Either he did before he left my cabin or he was too drunk to remember it was in the case of whiskey. Either way he left me with a grenade and walked away holding the pin.”

  “Where is it now?”

  I patted my breast pocket. Her eyes widened a little, but they still weren’t as big as Mary Ann Thaler’s.

  “Do you think it’s wise to carry it around? It should be in a safe deposit box.”

  “Hiding it in a safe place didn’t help Booth. Anyway I don’t think anyone knows it exists. Otherwise whoever strung him up would have tossed the cabin looking for it.”

  “Why is it still important? Clifford’s dead. His reputation is of no use to anyone.”

  “It is to the city of Detroit,” I said. “They’ve built this latest renaissance on his shoulders. A white hero in a black cause might go a long way toward reversing white flight. I don’t think they’d kill an old man to protect his memory, but I’ve seen worse done by people high up.”

  “Alive he was an asset to the underworld. Dead he’s a boon to society. How ironic.”

  “There’s a book in that.”

  She gave me the violet stare. “I’m sorry a man got killed, but I’m fighting for my life. If Booth’s manuscript still exists I want it.”

  “Are you making a pitch?”

  “You don’t have to take the job if it repels you. There are other private detectives who will, some of them just as good as you and maybe better. But they’d lose at least a day catching up to where you are now. Meanwhile whoever has the book may burn it.”

  “It’s probably burned already. It’s evidence of murder.”

  “The chance is worth taking. I’ll double your fee and add a bonus if you manage to deliver the script. Ten thousand dollars.”

  “You can’t afford ten thousand. Even if I find the book, you don’t own it.”

  “I’d have advanced him a lot more to publish it. I can scratch up the difference to deal with his literary estate. If he didn’t have one I’ll enter a claim in Lansing. In any case that�
��s my headache. Yours is to continue the investigation. If you agree.” She leaned forward and touched my hand. “Do it for me if not the money. We have a history.”

  I patted hers and sat back. “I’ll do it for the money.”

  Nothing changed in her face. Everything else had. She opened her purse and drew out a checkbook bound in gray suede leather.

  “I’ll pay you what I owe so far, along with three days’ advance based on the new terms,” she said, uncapping a silver pen. “That should cover your expenses until you know something definite.”

  “Just make it out for the fifteen hundred I’ve earned.I’ll bill you at the other end, the old fee, and I’ll hold you to the bonus, just to keep it interesting. The cops get suspicious when a private star butts in on an open case for nothing but his health. I want to see this out.”

  She regarded me. Then she shook her head and began writing. “I can’t make up my mind whether you’re the shrewdest man I ever met or the most ridiculous. Perhaps that’s how you survive.”

  “It sure isn’t my diet.” I drank the rest of my Scotch.

  She handed me the check and stood. Her gaze fell to the copy of the Free Press folded on the corner of the desk. “I forgot to mention I’m not your only out-of-town visitor this week. I see Glad Eddie Cypress is coming to sign his book.”

  “I thought you turned him down.”

  “My boss didn’t. The book’s number three on the Times list. Eddie’s doing a twenty-city tour.” She unfolded the paper and touched a corner article with a clear glossy nail.

  It was a publisher’s handout about the Mafia hitman-turned-government witness and his appearance that coming Sunday at Borders Books in Birmingham, with a picture of Cypress smiling with pen in hand. The smile caught my eye, possibly because it was the last thing some fifteen people had seen when he had been holding something else. When I covered the top half of his face with my hand I recognized it myself. He looked older without the Yankees cap and dark glasses.

  19

  Ididn’t tell Louise about Glad Eddie. It would have led to more questions I couldn’t answer, and I had enough of those already to qualify for associate membership in the Detroit local of the philosophers’ union. When she was gone, leaving behind that faint trace of foxglove, I switched off the fan and locked up.

  I drove home through the chalky half-tone of early dusk, stopping only for a sandwich and a cup of coffee at a place on Warren that was got up like an old-time diner in hopes of snaring the casino trade; only the casinos had run into a legal snag and the whites of desperation showed in the eyes of the proprietor behind the counter as he filled the orders of half a dozen customers scattered like coins in a beggar’s hat. The sandwich was good and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but I didn’t finish it. I kept thinking that my last meal had been steak-and-eggs with Eugene Booth.

  TV had nothing better to offer than three sitcoms about young divorced mothers of small precocious children and an hour-long drama about lawyers. I’d brought in the package that had come for me at the Angler’s Inn and I broke it open and admired Lowell Birdsall’s cover, a study in reds and yellows of a bent-nosed brute grappling with a blonde in a fringed taxi-dancer’s dress on a ballroom floor ringed with human apes in deep shadow. But I wasn’t in the mood for Booth’s prose and laid down Some of My Best Friends Are Killers halfway through the first short chapter.

  I lit a cigarette and put it out. I poured myself a drink and abandoned it after one sip. I couldn’t seem to stick with anything. I thought about going to bed. Although my eyes were burning and my shoulder blades stung from the long drive south I saw nothing in front of me but a night of rolling out the lumps in my mattress. So I did what I always did when I didn’t feel like thinking. I called Barry Stackpole.

  “Hello, Amos.” He sounded bright and youthful. People who spend all their time stewing over blowtorch murders generally do.

  I hesitated. “So you caved in and got Caller ID. I guess that makes me the last Mohican.”

  “I didn’t neither. The people who place the threatening calls I have to worry about are smart enough to dial star sixty-seven first. Only two people have this number and the other one’s on Death Row in Texas.” Ice tinkled on his end. He swallowed. “You sound like you’re in the next cell. Divorce business getting too lively?”

  “Go to hell. I drove four hours today on top of a police interrogation.”

  “Well, the drive is new. Which police, Chicago?”

  “Cheboygan County.”

  “You’re kidding. They got law up there now? I thought everybody settled their differences with dueling pistols.”

  “No, that’s Detroit. I ran into someone you might know.”

  “If it was in Cheboygan County he must have been floating facedown in a lake.”

  “Why a lake?” Barry had been working on developing a sixth sense for as long as I’d known him.

  “Nobody goes north in Michigan for the culture. Take away the lakes and you might as well be in Nebraska. Was I right about the floater?”

  “No, this one’s still alive and doing a good job of it. Cypress is the name.”

  Ice tinkled and clanked, but this time he didn’t drink. “That cocksucker.” It was barely audible.

  “So you know him.”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure. I haven’t had the plague either, but I know enough not to make pets of strange rats.”

  “Your sense of humor’s wearing thin,” I said. “You make your living reporting on the comings and goings of rats like Glad Eddie.”

  “If you can call cable TV a living. I get along with goons just fine. You ought to see the Christmas cards I get from Sing Sing and San Quentin. They skim a little, burn down buildings for the insurance, and occasionally beat some poor schmo to death with a baseball bat for missing one too many loan payments. They get caught or they don’t, do the time or they don’t, rat each other out for immunity or a plea to a lesser charge. But so far only one of them’s slid out from under fifteen contract murders and wheeled and dealed it into his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If I got a Christmas card from him I’d shove it up his ass with a bayonet. What’s a fuck like him doing up in the pines?”

  “That was yesterday. Sunday he’s in Detroit. Well, Birmingham. He’s schlepping a book.”

  “I heard. I hope it goes big and he celebrates with vodka and Valium.”

  “Twelve hours after I saw him at Black Lake the man staying in the motel cabin next to his strangled to death with his own belt. Are you interested?”

  The silence on his end was just long enough to register. “Your place or mine?”

  “Are you drinking?”

  “I jumped off the wagon to make a deadline. I can cab it over if you’re beat.”

  “Do that.”

  “Haig and Haig?”

  “Chivas.”

  “Barbarian. Be there in twenty.”

  A Checker delivered him at the front door. He paused for a quick handshake, then strode in fast, the way he always did when in his current condition, to keep the effects of the alcohol from catching up. They showed only in the metallic brightness of his eyes and a minor limp. When he was granite sober, an orthopedic surgeon couldn’t tell which leg was artificial. The white cotton gloves he wore to disguise his two missing fingers gave him the air of a country club gentleman, an image he could carry off when it suited him, although he was just as comfortable in the company of Hell’s Angels and guys named Vinnie the Aardvark.

  Considering the hours he keeps and the circles he travels in, Barry should look ten years older than he is. He’s my age and could pass for a college senior. Tonight I wondered if the hairdressers at the cable station where he kept weekly on-air tabs on the underworld elite might be responsible for the absence of gray in his sandy temples, but he had the complexion of a kid at church camp.

  He glanced around at the living room, made no comment—the place hadn’t changed since his last visit, and anyway he’d spent three yea
rs sleeping in roach motels and underground garages after a bomb in his car failed to carry away more than a quarter of his anatomy—and flung himself into the only completely comfortable chair I owned. He had on an orange sweater, windowpane-plaid slacks, and well-worn moccasins with pink socks. “Pour,” he said.

  I’d brought in an extra glass from the kitchen, filled it, and handed it to him. “Where’s Veronica and Jug-head?”

  “What, the outfit? I met my prospective father-in-law today. He thinks this is how they dress at Harvard.”

  “Who’s the lucky mafiosa?” I topped off the drink I’d been nursing for a half hour and sat on the sofa.

  “Cynic.” He drank and screwed up his face. Then he lifted his brows. “It is Chivas. I thought maybe you’d saved the bottle. Stuff still tastes like iodine. The bride-to-be’s name is Tatyana, and she’s the prettiest little linebacker you’ve ever seen in a size fifteen.”

  “Russian mob?”

  “Ukrainian. Her old man’s silent partner in a couple of Indian casinos up north. He’s got his eye on Detroit. That’s the deadline I’m working on. Gaming Commission decides on his partner’s license application first of next month.”

  “June wedding?”

  He nodded with his eyes closed. The steel plate in his skull gave him migraines. “If the commission postpones I may have to ask you to be my best man.”

  “Ever consider an easier line of work?”

  “Back at you. At least the food’s good at an eastern European wedding. And they don’t serve Scotch.” He put his down, but not before helping himself to another sip. “Well, well. Glad Eddie Cypress. As I live and breathe. Which is not an expression he’d be used to hearing. I read his book.”

  “Already? It’s just out.”

  “His publisher sent me an advance copy. I guess you didn’t catch my review. I blew it to pieces with the sawed-off shotgun the boys in ATF took out of Joey Grenada’s place on Lake Michigan last summer. I can’t wait to see if they quoted that on the dust jacket.”

  “Eddie got under your skin.”

  “It’s the country I ought to be mad at. We gave Capone his day, but then we put him in jail. You and I must have been in Cambodia the week someone decided it was supposed to go the other way around. But you can’t fight the country, so I’ll just go ahead and hate Cypress. You know why they call him Glad Eddie? It’s not because of that shit-eating grin of his.”