A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

by Loren D. Estleman

  “He might have a record.”

  “He might. It wouldn’t shock me. Many of those PBO writers were odd ducks, misanthropes and misfits. They rode the rails, picked lettuce, bellhopped, went to war and were changed by it; some of them served time on chain gangs. The stuff they wrote was too raw for the cloth trade. They got away with more in paper because that whole industry wasn’t respectable to begin with. That’s why they’re so popular now. The rest of society has caught up with them.”

  I jingled the ice in my glass. “Even if I find him he won’t want to come back.”

  “Finding him is only half the job. I want you to learn why he backed out. If I know what the problem is, maybe I can help fix it.”

  “You do want a psychiatrist.”

  She finished her Bacardi and touched her lower lip with a little finger. The lacquered nail was rounded to accommodate a computer keyboard. “I admit I thought of you because of the Detroit connection. But you’re perfect for this job. You’re the kind of detective Booth wrote about; the kind they say doesn’t exist in real life. He’s sure to see that. If you can get him to trust you, you can find out what’s wrong. I’m sure of it.”

  “Two Model T’s chasing each other on the Information Superhighway,” I said. “Talk about your photo ops.”

  “It’s not a publicity stunt, Amos. I need Booth.” One hand gripped the other on the table, the knuckles pale against the tan. “My severance package and 401K went into the rent on the office suite. I floated a loan to cover the advances I paid out. I turn forty again this year. I’m too old to go back and start from the bottom.”

  “I heard your joints creaking all the way from the street.”

  She said nothing.

  I picked up Paradise Valley and looked at it again, front and back. It didn’t mean anything to me beyond an interesting read. I slid it and Booth’s note into my inside breast pocket. It had been a long time since a paperback had fit there. They were coming much thicker now, and cost twenty times more.

  Louise knew what the gesture meant. She smiled, unfolded her hands, and got the waiter’s attention. He brought menus bound in aubergine suede.

  “We are offering a summer special on barbecued spareribs,” he said.

  I said, “It isn’t summer.”

  “I’m aware of that, sir. Our chef is under the influence of the weather.”

  Louise handed back her menu. “I’ll have the ribs.”

  I ordered the London Broil. When the ribs came, charred at the ends and drenched in rust-colored sauce, I said, “You shouldn’t have worn white.”

  “That’s what my ex-husband said.” Her smile turned wicked. She shrugged out of the jacket, rolled up her sleeves, and tucked her linen napkin into her collar. She polished off half a rack with her fingers and never got a spot on her. Some people are like that. I can’t walk past an Italian restaurant without ruining a good necktie.

  2

  When the waiter took her credit card, Louise asked him to call for a cab. I offered to drop her off at her hotel. She shook her head.

  “I’d rather you got to work right away. Anyway, I’m staying with a friend in Hazel Park. I’ll be there through the end of next week.” She gave me the telephone number.

  I wrote it down and got up to help her with her jacket. “Old friend?”

  “Too young to be old. She’s the local sales representative for my former place of employment. I mean to steal her as soon as I can afford to hire sales reps.” She smiled. “Did you think it was a man?”

  “Does it matter what I think?”

  She studied me for a long moment. Then she shook her head again and slung her bag over her shoulder. “Oh, no. I’ve edited Washington politicians whose faces I could read easier.”

  “I’m a riddle wrapped in a mystery with a crunchy almond center.” I went out with her to the canopy to wait for the cab.

  When a caved-in Black-and-White took her away, leaking exhaust out of everything but its tailpipe, I went for a stroll. I had some research to do, but it was too nice a day to go straight back to the office. I headed up Woodward with the sun on my back, smelling the concrete heating up and feeling the Beastie Boys in my feet from the monster speakers in the back of every third car that passed me. The odd convertible top was down, fluorescent-pale legs stuck out of short pants that had lain in drawers since September, and everywhere I looked the city of Detroit was beginning to creep out of its horned winter shell; but not so far that it couldn’t shrink back in at the first sign of a rogue snowflake.

  In Grand Circus Park I found a section of bench the pigeons hadn’t targeted, took off my coat, and sat down, stretching out my legs and pressing my shoulders against the dry weathered wood of the slats. I slipped the old paperback out of the coat and opened it. Five or six pages would give me the writing style, and through it a glimpse of the writer.

  I’d read ten chapters when a shelf of steely cloud slid in front of the sun and touched my face with its metallic shadow. It was the story of Roland Clifford, a white Detroit beat cop badly injured while trying to protect three Negro defense-plant workers from a racist mob during the riot that swept the city in June 1943. The blurb on the back cover announced that the narrative was based on fact, but no straight journalism I had read about the incident approached the visceral power of Eugene Booth’s unadorned fiction. The sentences were lean and angular, as if they’d been scratched onto the page with a needle, and the story moved along as if it had been prodded by the sharp tip.

  When I’d sat down, I had shared the park with a woman and two children and a number of downtown office workers in their shirtsleeves, eating sandwiches from greasy paper sacks and reading on the grass. Now I was alone. I marked my place with Booth’s note and walked back to the lot where I’d left my car. The wind had shifted from Windsor, cold off the river. I didn’t pass a single pair of shorts on the way.

  I’d had a green spring. A lawyer representing a local trucking firm had retained me to collect affidavits from witnesses to an accident involving one of its drivers in Indiana, a college basketball coach whose wife had walked out with their joint savings account hired me to bring back the wife or the money, or just the money if I couldn’t do both, and a computer software store where I’d worked undercover ten days on a case of employee theft had decided to pay me for the month they thought it would take me to stop the bleeding. That and the lawyer’s retainer and a few other jobs made up for getting stiffed when I told the basketball coach his wife had earned every penny for sticking past the honeymoon. He clipped me in the mouth in lieu of paying, and got a receipt in the form of a dislocated jaw.

  The money went into a crown, the retirement fund, a bottle of good Scotch, new magazines for the waiting room, and the Olds Cutlass, which now had a rebuilt carburetor and stainless steel pipes, handily disguised by dents and chalky paint. I use it to nudge supermarket carts out of parking spaces and blow off troopers on the interstate.

  I didn’t need Louise Starr’s job. Only half of it was my specialty—the missing persons half—and anyway I’d been thinking of driving up to the Upper Peninsula for a couple of weeks to look up an old cop acquaintance who liked to fish, and let my beard grow. I could always start another retirement fund. She’d figured that might happen, and that was why she’d come in person. It’s much easier to say no over the telephone, without the violet eyes and the foxglove.

  I had a customer outside the office reading that month’s Forbes, but it was a divorce case. I told him to try the marriage counselor on the fourth floor. It’s a three-story building. When he left I unlocked the door to the inner chamber, pried up the window to let out the trapped heat, oiled the old nickel-and-iron fan for later, and sat down behind the desk to burn some offerings on the altar of the god of standard operating procedure.

  Louise’s information was a pale carbon of a rough sketch done from someone’s faulty memory. Eugene Booth had married once, in 1954, and been widowed within two years, no children. He had been honorabl
y discharged from the U.S. Army at the end of the Korean War and had outlived his parents and his only sibling, a brother named Duane. He had worked for a number of newspapers before his books sold and held down a slew of odd jobs, emphasis on odd: sparring partner, hardware clerk, chainsaw salesman, slaughterhouse worker, florist, mortuary attendant, volunteer fireman, grease monkey, floorwalker, apprentice exterminator. I could have gotten most of that off the back of one of his books. For an update I called my contact in the Michigan Secretary of State’s office, who brought up a recent driver’s license for Booth comma Eugene comma No Middle, in five minutes, complete with picture. He said he’d messenger it over. I said I’d money him later. Armed with an official description I called all the area hospitals, starting with the VA, and determined that no septuagenarian white male of Booth’s height and weight and coloring had been admitted under that name or any other within the past week. The singsong Indian voice I got at the Wayne County Morgue looked under all the sheets and reported the same thing. All the John Does were either too young or too black.

  Booth’s Social Security and army pension checks went to a post office box in Belleville. The next ones weren’t due until the first of June.

  It was getting chilly in the office. The building superintendent had switched off the furnace on May 15 and wouldn’t turn it on again before November. I leaned the window shut and sat back down and read three more chapters of Booth’s book, but the bloody business in the old black area of town known as Paradise Valley just made me restless. I put it back in my pocket, got my car out of the best space I’d had since someone bought the abandoned service station across the street, and made a research trip to John King Used & Rare Books.

  The drab four-story building that sticks up like a blunt thumb from West Lafayette near the John Lodge Expressway was moved there when the interstate came through in 1947, God knows why. It’s a hundred years old, but there are holes all over the city skyline where older and better-looking structures have been pulverized by the wrecking ball. It had been a glove factory in the thirties and forties, then an empty building after gloves went the way of Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat. That was when John King bought it, tore out most of the partitions, reinforced the interior walls, and filled it top to bottom with books on every subject, from the wit and wisdom of Yogi Berra to the post-metamorphal changes in the vertebrae of the marbled salamander, and by authors as varied as Sinclair Lewis and Louis Farrakhan. You can smell the decayed paper and moldering buckram from the far end of the parking lot. It’s a scent well known to bibliophiles, archaeologists, and private detectives who spend much of their time in records offices and basement file rooms.

  In the dank interior I climbed a short flight of steps to the sales counter, where a tall young woman with the profile of an African princess directed me to the second floor. This was a vast space divided by stacks of books on wooden shelves with fluorescent troughs suspended above the aisles. A youngish compact man in glasses and a necktie on a denim work shirt led me to a shallow room off the stairs. The door was secured by a piece of wood stuck through the handle with KEEP OUT PLEASE written on it in Magic Marker.

  I thought for a moment I had penetrated to the center of the Denver Mint.

  He drew out the piece of wood and let me inside. “The books are arranged by catalogue number. That’s the bible there on the window ledge. I’ll be out here if you need me, shelving books. I’m always shelving books. We process two thousand books per week.”

  “I brought this one with me.” I showed him the battered copy of Paradise Valley.

  A lip curled. “We’d charge about a buck for that downstairs.”

  “Someone told me it was worth a hundred.”

  “Not in that condition. What you see in here is as good as you’ll ever find. The idea was to get literature into people’s hands cheap. That didn’t mean using vellum and good parchment. On a quiet night you can hear the paper crumble.”

  “So books aren’t forever.”

  “Books are. The material they’re printed on isn’t. That’s what makes the rare titles so rare.”

  He left me, although from time to time I saw him looking at me through the glass half-wall that separated the room from the rest of the floor. He must have thought I was a rival dealer.

  The paperbacks lined the walls and free-standing cases in solid banks of silver and yellow and black, depending upon the signature color each publisher had chosen for its spines. Each was pocketed in its own glassine bag with a round price sticker pasted on the back. Opaque plastic shades dulled the sunlight coming through the tall outside windows as a further precaution against early demise.

  I hefted a three-inch-thick volume off the ledge beneath the glass wall. Its warped cover read U.S. Paperbacks 1939-1959. The information inside was listed alphabetically and numerically under publisher headings, cross-indexed by author, title, and catalogue order number. I looked up Booth’s name and found ten titles listed under Tiger Books. I scribbled the numbers into my notebook, returned the volume to the ledge, and turned to the stacks.

  The system took getting used to. The books were numbered chronologically, and since few authors were prolific enough to offer a series of new titles in a row, tracking down the entire work of one writer involved skipping from shelf to shelf. After some confusion over why Gardner should occupy the spot next to Thompson, and what Woolrich was doing cozying up to Adams, I got the rhythm at last and wound up with three Booth books from those on the list: Deadtime Story, Tough Town, and Bullets Are My Business. All the covers appeared to have been painted by the same artist. He had a weakness for broken-nosed brutes and blondes in torn lingerie.

  When I emerged from the room, relieved to be breathing a greater volume of oxygen among the odor of mummy wrappings in the larger space, my guide approached on the trot and punched home the piece of wood. Now the books were safe from everyone but John Dillinger.

  “There are six more I’m looking for,” I said.

  “All we can do is promise to call you if any come in. You can make out a want list at the counter and leave your number.”

  “What are the chances I’ll fill it?”

  “Ten, fifteen years ago, not bad. These days it’s John Grisham, Stephen King, Anne Rice. Bushels and bushels of romances. We have to turn them away. But you never know: Someone dies, his children clean out the old house, find a box in the attic, and bring it down to see what they can get. Sometimes we strike gold.”

  “When someone dies.”

  He adjusted his glasses. “There are more ghoulish ways to make a living. It isn’t as if we perch on a dead branch.”

  “Who would shelve the books if you did?”

  The three books came to fifteen dollars and change. There had been two copies in stock of both Tough Town and Bullets Are My Business, which apparently weren’t as hard to find as Paradise Valley. The African princess arched her brows. They made perfect half-circles above her large clear eyes. “Are you a collector?”

  “Yes.” Bills and bruises. “The fellow upstairs wasn’t impressed.”

  “He’s a nice guy, but paperbacks aren’t his thing. He prefers to spend his time in the rare book room in the other building, oiling the leather bindings. This is the man you want to compare notes with. He comes in once or twice a week to add to his want list.” She found a business card under the counter and laid it in front of me. “You can keep it. Everyone here has memorized all his numbers by now.”

  The information was printed vertically, the way they were doing it now to include fax and cell phone and pager numbers and e-mail addresses and websites. One more communications breakthrough and they’ll have to add a second page. Centered, at the top:

  LOWELL BIRDSALL

  Systems Analysis

  I had a flash of a bald fatty in a Star Trek shirt, smelling of Ben-Gay. I thanked her and parked the card in the dead end of my wallet, next to the scratch-and-win tickets I got with ten bucks’ worth of Unleaded.

  3


  I‘d read enough for one day. I poked the slim paper sack containing the three books into the glove compartment and tickled the big 455 engine into grumbling life. The new carburetor fed it a good mix and the exhaust bubbled pleasantly in the shiny pipes. When I let it out on the Lodge, the last thirty years beaded up and rolled off the long hood and nubby vinyl top like rain. I switched on the AM radio hoping for Jan and Dean and got a gang of grumps complaining about taxes and the Detroit Tigers. I turned it off and let the wind whistle.

  I slid past the orange barrels on the Edsel Ford just ahead of rush hour and exited at Belleville, a low-slung community of strip malls, tract houses, and brick apartment complexes doing their best to look like English manor homes with only picture postcards and old C. Aubrey Smith movies to go by. The farther west you travel on the Ford, the less the place matters; but everyone has to have someone to look down on, and so the citizens of Belleville look down on Romulus, which lies to the east, directly in the flight path to Wayne County International Airport.

  The White Pine Mobile Home Park was Eugene Booth’s last known employer and place of residence. The directions I’d gotten had left out a stop sign. I turned too early and drove a couple of miles through flat farmland broken up by mounds of raw earth where subdivisions were going in before I came to a T and retraced my route. I finally found the park, across from a neighborhood of large older houses with tidy lawns and a glowering aspect, like you always see where developers have moved too fast for a community grievance committee to form. The only pines in view were the ones painted on the sign that identified the place. If any had ever stood there, they’d been cleared to make room for the trailers.

  The sun was out again, its rays bending through the curvature of the windshield, yet my hands felt cold on the wheel. I’d driven that same car into one of those places once before and things had not turned out well. It had been a long time ago, but I had shot a woman, and I couldn’t think about it without feeling a dull ache in the precise spot where the bullet had gone in.