A Smile on the Face of the Tiger
Page 23
“You’re a little old to be taking as many beatings as you do.”
“If that’s a contract offer, I’ll quit and learn to type with all my fingers.”
“Sorry. Nobody wants to read about good guys anymore. It’s all hitmen and serial killers and people who lied for the president. Maybe I’m the one who should think about making a change.”
We went on to a red Edsel. Four decades of shag rugs, polyester neckties, Beanie Babies, and feminine hygiene commercials hadn’t done a thing to make the horsecollar grille look any more beautiful.
“What’s going to happen to Fleta?” she asked.
“Probably nothing. Thaler isn’t keen to hand it over to the county prosecutor, even if he’d thank her for cracking open a forty-year-old egg under his nose. Fleta’s losing a piece of herself every day at Edencrest. Prison wouldn’t be any worse.”
“So Allison Booth’s murder was an old-fashioned crime of passion.”
“It was a little more cold-blooded than that. After Bird-sail left Fleta in his studio, she waited for him to come back with Allison. She picked up one of his palette knives and hid behind the folding screen where the models changed. She didn’t know who she was going to use the knife on, Birdsall or Allison or both, but she’d made up her mind to use it. She was candid about all this after she calmed down. That tussle in her room got the blood flowing to her brain. It was a lucid confession.”
“The police were right, then. Allison was running around behind her husband’s back.”
“For all we know it was the only time. I imagine it’s tough being married to a writer. They live in their heads most of the day. Birdsall was the whore in the picture. He seduced Fleta the way he did all his models and didn’t mind bragging to her that he was out to seduce his best friend’s wife too.”
“But he helped her get rid of the body.”
“It was the only thing he could do, after he got the knife away from her and quieted her down. He was afraid of Booth. Booth was a boxer, remember. The studio was already stained all over with paint. He splashed some cadmium red on top of the blood, wrapped Allison in a dropcloth, and waited till past midnight to smuggle her down to the car and out to that window well. Later, when Fleta told the cops she and Birdsall were working that night, she wasn’t providing an alibi for him. It was for herself.”
“But won’t it all come out now because of Lowell Junior?”
“He’s the main reason it won’t. He believes his father killed Allison. I never met the man, but what I’ve heard doesn’t make me feel a bit uncomfortable to let the cops go on thinking the same thing.”
“What a terrible secret to carry around all these years. No wonder Fleta lost her mind.”
“That was Alzheimer’s. If it weren’t for that she’d still be carrying it. Anyway it was more terrible for Eugene Booth. It was too hard for a tough-guy writer like him to accept the fact his wife was cheating on him, so he told himself the mob killed her because he talked too much about Roland Clifford and the riot. In the end he’d convinced himself of it. Only that was harder on him, because it meant he was indirectly responsible for her death. That’s the ironic part. If he’d just believed the truth in the first place, he’d have gotten over it years and years ago.”
“Maybe not. If there was anything to brood over, he’d have brooded over it, and if there wasn’t, he’d have found something to brood over in its place. For a certain kind of person, that’s as close to happy as they ever get.”
“Could be,” I said. “Fortunately I don’t have to be deep.”
“Right. Everything beads up on you like water on plastic.”
I looked at her. She was hugging herself, stroking one arm. Part of it was Booth, but we happened to be standing in front of the black Lincoln convertible in which JFK had been killed, parked in line in a phantom motorcade made up of automobiles that had carried FDR, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and LBJ; all dead men with middle initials and long-kept secrets of their own. Broken heroes all, like Roland Clifford and Eugene Booth.
“Lowell Junior was a victim of his own lies too,” she said. “Will he survive?”
“His hanging, yeah. I don’t know about the lies. You can put that in the preface. It’ll help flesh out the book.”
“You think all I care about is the book.”
“Give me back the briefcase and I’ll apologize.”
She shook her head. “That would be like killing Gene Booth all over again. He wanted to set the record straight. That’s why he sent back the check.”
“Don’t pay any attention to anything I say. My ribs hurt and I’ve got a black eye on top of a black eye that was the black eye to end them all in the first place. You’ve got a publishing house to launch. It’s okay if you do it on top of a few corpses. They won’t mind. Booth would sure as hell mind your saying it was all for him, though. I didn’t spend much time with him, but what I spent bought me plenty.”
“There’s no moral law against doing something for someone and yourself at the same time. It will be a dignified promotion. I’m thinking of approaching Maya Angelou to write an introduction.”
“She’ll sell fifty thousand copies,” I said. “Breaking the Clifford story just before publication will move another half million.”
“Just before. If it breaks too soon, it will be old news months before we can get the book into production. I have to ask you for Duane Booth’s original police report.”
“That wasn’t part of the deal.”
“I thought you and I were beyond deals, Amos.”
“No good,” I said. “Some women can get away with the look. Not you.”
“What look?”
“A torn slip and a broken bottle. You’re too refined to trade a night in Hazel Park for services.”
“That’s a crude way to put it. I wasn’t talking about that.”
“Okay. Let’s just say I was off the clock. The police report’s promised to someone else. In my work you have to put up information in return for information received. I stonewalled two police departments to hang on to it.”
“Am I allowed to ask who?”
“I think that’s whom.” When her face didn’t change I said, “You know him. Barry Stackpole.”
“Oh, Barry. Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I’ll talk to him.” She looked at her wristwatch, a tiny one with an amber face on an alligator strap. “I need time to return my rental. We’ll have to say good-bye here.”
She kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were cool and the foxglove scent was there. “Thank you for everything. Don’t you dare come through New York without calling me.”
After she left I browsed among the exhibits, but they weren’t doing anything for me. I got my car out of the lot and drove to the post office, where I bummed a priority envelope and slipped into it the police report Eugene Booth’s brother Duane had written on the 1943 riot before he changed his mind and filed another. I tore a sheet out of my notebook and started a note to Barry about Louise Starr, then crumpled it up; Barry’s a big boy. I sealed the flap, addressed the envelope to him, paid the postage, and gave it to the clerk.
I had the afternoon ahead of me. I’d cleared the entire day for the museum. I smoked a cigarette until the meter ran out, then started the motor and drove to the Corner to watch Detroit lose one more time in the old ballpark.