A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Until the guy that started it has a change of heart.”

  “Not even then. Not then, anyway. This was the fifties, remember. You could say MacArthur was an arrogant fuck and Ike whored around with a WAC and James Dean took it up the ass and nobody’d listen. Vietnam and Watergate changed all that. Now when someone goes up like a balloon we all admire him with our fingers in our ears waiting for the pop. New York’s a small town. When it gets out Booth’s back and signing a new deal for Paradise Valley, New York decides to do Detroit a favor and find out what he’s got in mind.”

  “That’s stupid. Clifford’s dead. What harm could the truth do the Detroit mob now?”

  “Not any. The legit crowd’s a different story. You’ve got a nice little renaissance going and Roland Clifford’s part of it. They want to name a street after him, throw up a statue or two and probably a scholarship. See, when he died, the organization was through with him. That’s when he became the property of the straights. When I said New York put me on Booth as a favor to Detroit, I didn’t mean the mob. I meant Detroit.”

  “Who signed off on that?”

  “Nobody confided in me. At a guess? New York’s idea. New York meaning the organization. A little fence-mending with the organization in Detroit, by way of a peace offering with the city. Buying cops is Cold War thinking. You’ve got to buy cities if you want to compete.”

  “All this without checking to see if it’s what Detroit wanted,” I said. “Amazing.”

  “I told you I was sick of working for idiots.”

  “You’re telling me you killed Booth.”

  “I told you I didn’t. I was just there to spot the job. I did the homework, found out where Booth liked to work, and traced him to Black Lake and the Angler’s Inn. If I gave it thumbs up and they decided to go ahead, they would’ve rung in somebody local to cap it off. Somebody invisible, which I’m not. The only reason they risked using me at all is they wanted to keep me nervous. Also I was going to Detroit anyway to promote the book, which gave me a cover.”

  “Which you blew by using stolen plates.”

  “Somebody’s idea of a joke. They gave me the keys to the truck and the address of the garage where it was parked. Don’t forget I’m a running sore. You can bet the trail would’ve stopped with me if I got pulled over. I’d have a brand new beef and it didn’t matter if the job got blown, it wasn’t important. Just a favor. I didn’t know about the plates until you told me.”

  I drank. The Campau was losing its fizz. “Any idea who drew the Booth job?”

  “Not Detroit. Not the organization, I mean. I nixed the job. You check out those locks when you were at the inn?”

  “I pushed one in. Took about two seconds.”

  “What’d you do with the second second? He went out one night for a walk and I let myself in and read what he’d written. It was red hot, but it was fiction. There wasn’t anything to back it up. I put the pages back the way I found them and went out and called New York and told them Booth wasn’t worth the investment.”

  “Toss the cabin?”

  “I’m rusty. I ain’t broke down. I went through his suitcase and the closet and under the bed. I checked out the typewriter case and turned the machine upside-down. I didn’t want to make a mess and I didn’t have the time to do it neat and thorough. Did I miss something?”

  “How would I know? I’m just being neat and thorough. If you put back Booth’s manuscript, who took it? It wasn’t there when I cut him down.”

  “Find it and you’ve found the one who strung him up. Just a guess.”

  “Maybe New York didn’t like your report.”

  “Maybe. Fuck that. Why bother sending me in the first place?”

  “Setup.”

  He shook his head and rasped his palms. “That’s the first thing I thought of. Only they didn’t need to go to the trouble. Back when the feds gave me immunity, a couple of things didn’t come up on account of they didn’t know about them. If they came out now I’d be on my way to the Marion pen in a New York minute, ha. So the boys back home don’t need Number Sixteen.”

  “Uh-uh.” I grinned over my glass. “If that were true, New York would have rolled over on you months ago.”

  “It wouldn’t be as much fun as what they’re doing to me right now.” He wasn’t grinning.

  “Poor Glad Eddie.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Not today. Who pushed the button on Allison Booth in fifty-six?”

  “Nobody. That was an amateur job.”

  “It’s a lot easier to make a professional job look amateur than the other way around.”

  “Not as easy as you think. Ever try to arrange some things on a table so it looks as if they just landed there? Anyway it wasn’t an organization act.”

  “You seem pretty familiar with the details.”

  “Right. I was seven. I rode over from Brooklyn on my hobby horse and stuck her with my rubber Zorro knife. I do my homework, Walker. When I do a job—did a job—I tracked it clear back to the womb. Booth’s wife was a stepper. She stepped one time too many and got stepped on herself.”

  “Booth didn’t see it that way. He figured her death was a warning to keep his mouth shut about Roland Clifford.”

  “He wrote fiction. Out here in the world you don’t kick in a wife or a close relative when you can get the same effect by throwing a dead canary on someone’s doorstep. You take too much from a man, he stops caring. You might as well set up the press conference yourself. And that’s another thing. Booth didn’t believe she was hit either. Otherwise he’d have burned Roland Clifford in effigy in the middle of Cadillac Square. Whatever else he told you, he spent forty years talking himself into. He didn’t believe it when it counted.”

  I said nothing. He rasped his hands. “Anyway, like I said, after Paradise Valley nothing Booth could say would’ve slowed down the momentum. Not unless he had proof.”

  I was looking at him. Mob guys are great liars and lousy at coming clean. His gaze darted about and if he rubbed his hands together any faster he’d start a fire. That’s when I knew he was telling the truth.

  27

  Herb wobbled in from the other room looking like a man who had not survived Everest. He was a colorful bruiser, all eggplant and yellow and royal blue, not the best quality to bring to his line of work; but then I couldn’t see him taking a civil service exam either. He hesitated by the table containing the guns. I could see all his gears and pulleys working from where I sat.

  So could Cypress. “You’re off duty. Pour yourself a slug and park it.”

  “I don’t drink.” But he wobbled over and sat down on the upholstered bench at the foot of the bed with his head propped in his hands.

  I said, “Whoever did Booth tore out a piece of his writing to look like a suicide note and walked off with the manuscript. Who’d do that, if Detroit or New York weren’t doubling up on you?”

  “Without evidence or Booth alive to back it up with an affidavit—which would be hearsay—it was just fiction. It had to be worth something to someone for some other reason.” Cypress remembered his Coke, picked it up, looked at the weak yellowish syrup, and put it back without drinking.

  I drained my glass, held the contents in my mouth for a moment, then let them go on down. I stood up, fast enough to startle Sargent Hurley and make Herb lift his shop-damaged head.

  “Something?” Cypress’ brows followed me up.

  “Nothing you could use. I think you’re out of it. If you’d gone ahead and met me for lunch, you could have spared your publicity staff a rough morning.”

  “They were getting fat.” He rose. “I might call you from Denver or someplace. I’m curious to see how this comes out.”

  Neither of us made a move to shake hands. I said, “Just a suggestion. Write the next one about what it’s like to promote a book instead of kill people.”

  “That’s not bad. Got a title?”

  I thought. “How about Crime and Punishment?”

 
; “That’s not bad, either,” he said. “Hasn’t it been used?”

  “Not in a long time.”

  He grinned. “I’m starting not to hate you, Walker. We’ve got a lot in common.”

  “About four quarts of blood and thirty feet of intestines. After that, nothing.”

  The grin went. “Maybe I won’t call you.”

  “Senso vostra angoscia.”

  Here I was, back at the Alamo, standing in front of 610. A couple more visits and I could start using it as my voting address.

  There was no answer after five minutes. I stepped over and rapped on 609. The young man with the gold rings and shaved head opened his door in nothing but a skimpy pair of red Y-fronts. There was a blue shadow on his narrow chest where he’d shaved there too. His eyelids were puffy. He was having trouble focusing. It was a few minutes past eleven-thirty.

  “Sorry to drag you out of the sack,” I said. “We met Saturday, sort of. I was looking for Lowell Birdsall. I still am.”

  “I remember.” There was a gurgle in the deep thud of his voice. He cleared his throat and swallowed. “He got in late last night.”

  “You were up?”

  “Along with about half the building. The owner’s thinking of renaming it the Anne Rice Arms.”

  “I couldn’t raise him.”

  “Who, the owner?”

  “Birdsall. Maybe he’s sleeping in too.”

  “I don’t think he ever gets more than four hours together. He never goes out during the business day. He must be in the can.”

  “I knocked loud. I need to talk to him. Do you still have a key?”

  “I can’t let you in if he isn’t there. If he is and he isn’t answering he must have his reasons.”

  I got out my ID folder and showed him the county star. “I just want to look around. You can go in with me.”

  “Let me put something on.”

  He started to push the door shut. My shoulder got in the way and he turned inside without so much as a shrug.

  There was a yellow telephone on the wall next to the door to the bathroom. He walked past it without a glance and went on through and closed the door behind him. What I could see of the place from the front door was tidy except for the rumpled bed. There were books and plants on shelves, a rack of stereo components, a CD tower shaped like the Capitol Records building, and a concert poster in a transparent Lucite frame of The Artist Before He Became Formerly Known As Whatsizname, decked out in Viennese court dress with a lace ruffle at his throat. The palette seemed to be purple and yellow. It looked better than it sounds. His and Birdsall’s apartments represented the artistic corner of an address that generally looked like a hastily packed suitcase.

  He came out wearing the same black net top, cutoff jeans, and sandals he’d had on the other day, jingling a ring of keys in rhythm with his walk. He locked up, went to Birdsall’s door, tapped a panel, waited, whistling pieces of some tune through his front teeth, then slipped one of the keys into the lock.

  Something struck the floor with a bang and a clatter when he pushed the door open. I thought at first he’d hit something, but the door swung all the way around on its hinges and he froze with one foot on the threshold, blocking most of the view. Looking around him I saw the plywood underside of a kitchen chair lying on its back with two tubular steel legs in the air. I shoved him hard from behind and when he stumbled I circled wide around him and went for the white thing wriggling and jerking twelve inches above the floor.

  Birdsall’s reflexes were just fine. I bit a piece off my tongue when a white-clad knee jerked up and caught me on the chin, but I got my arms around his waist and lifted with everything I had. I was getting to be good at that. He was as hard as a tree trunk under the top layer of flab and heavier than a sofa, and he was twisting in my grip like a live marlin. I had barely breath enough to call for a hand. The neighbor got hold of him and I let go and righted the chair and climbed up on it, clawing out my pocket knife. I sawed at the cord tied around the white metal runner of one of the track lights Birdsall had installed to show off his collection. The cord was insulated with brown fabric with a yellow stripe, the kind they used to put on irons and toasters, and the knot had sunk deep into his thick neck.

  The copper wire inside parted with a twang and the neighbor caught his weight with a grunt and lowered him to the floor. He had the noose yanked open by the time I stepped down.

  My cracked ribs burned holes in my sides. I bent over with my hands on my knees and dry-retched for the better part of a minute. Then I knelt beside Birdsall.

  His face, hairless except for the goatee and moustache, was changing color. The purple-black hue of congestion was fading, but his pale gray-pink tongue stuck out and his eyes were rolled back into his head so that only the glistening whites showed. I slapped his cheeks, using both sides of my hand, and called his name. He wasn’t breathing. I signaled for more room and when the neighbor stood up and away I stretched Birdsall out on the floor and pinched his nostrils and blew into his mouth. I did that seven times, counting the seconds in between, before his chest began to fill and empty on its own. His face had gone dead white in the meantime, as white as his T-shirt, but now the pink was coming back.

  Beep-boop-boop. The neighbor on the telephone, pipping out the three notes to salvation. I pried back each of Birdsall’s eyelids. His irises were back where they belonged. The pupils matched. He was breathing evenly. I dragged down one of the nubby green cushions from the loveseat and put it under his head. Then I got up and took a walk around the apartment.

  With the chair back up on its legs there were no signs of disturbance. His weight had pulled the light track into a V. Much more kicking like he’d been doing and he’d have torn the screws out of the ceiling joists. Cheap places to live are almost never easy places to die. The noise I’d heard had been the chair falling over when he kicked it out from under himself. There was no one hiding in the bathroom, a dank little closet with specks of black growing on the plastic shower curtain. It was a do-it-yourself job.

  “No, no,” the neighbor was saying into the receiver. “ West Jefferson. The Alamo Motel. Jesus. It’s only been here longer than the Penobscot Building. No, not the Penobscot. The Alamo. Apartment six-ten. Yeah. You be sure and have a nice day.”

  Fleta Skirrett bared her teeth at me from a canvas. Her blue eyes gleamed like the bottoms of polished china bowls, as big in the painting as half-dollars. Her dress was tiger orange, ripped loose from one white shoulder to expose her cleavage, and she had one orange-nailed fist wrapped around the handle of an automatic pistol, a shiny .32 like the one Glad Eddie Cypress had pointed at me. Her black pupils were as big around as my thumbs and had tiny flaws in their centers.

  I stepped closer. They weren’t flaws at all, but twin reflections of a brutish-looking male coming her way with a knife; not in the melodramatic overhand grip so popular among pulp artists who had never taken part in a knife fight or even witnessed one, but in the scooping underhand of the professional blade man. That was impressive. That was research. The reflections themselves wouldn’t have shown at all once the picture was reduced for reproduction on the cover of a cheap paperback. Lowell Senior was an artist. The industry hadn’t known what it had, in him or Booth. The definition of art in America.

  “Creepy shit, huh?” The neighbor’s voice shook a little. “No wonder he got depressed. Think he’ll be all right?”

  “He’ll live. If he were all right he wouldn’t have stepped off the chair.”

  “Well, duh.”

  I was only half listening, to him and myself. Birdsall’s dehumidifier was whirring in its corner. I went over and turned the dial all the way to the left. Silence came down with a thump. The reservoir had been emptied recently. He’d thought to preserve his collection beyond his own death. That was dedication. He was his father’s son.

  The Domino’s pizza box was gone from the vintage laminated table. A green marbleized clamshell box took up half the space it had occupied. It
was the kind archivists use to store and display valuable papers. I knew what was inside, but I went over anyway and tipped back the lid.

  I looked at a stack of coarse discolored sheets with dog-eared corners. They bore the Alamo letterhead, with the old two-letter telephone prefix and no ZIP, because the code had yet to be invented when the sheets were printed. Motels were still a novel concept then; even visitors to the Alamo didn’t mind letting the folks back home know where they’d landed. The sheets were covered with dense typing, with here and there whole paragraphs scratched out and thickly scribbled notes substituted between the lines. I’d seen it before and knew what it was, but I got out the note Eugene Booth had written Louise Starr when he returned her check and compared them. Handwriting can be forged, but not the wandering a and o of Eugene Booth’s old Smith-Corona.

  Someone groaned, a long grating sound like rusted metal parts scraping against each other, and I turned away from the box. Lowell Junior was coming around.

  28

  It was early afternoon when I got back to the office. I wasn’t hungry, but I’d stopped at the desperate diner for a BLT to boost my protein and help out the owner. When he rang up the sale on his old-fashioned cash register, the little number tab looked like a tombstone. I circled my block twice, then found a space two streets over. I walked through one of those spring rains that doesn’t do much more than stamp circles in the dust on the sidewalk. It didn’t even get my head wet.