A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

by Loren D. Estleman

  An Airstream trailer parked just inside the entrance had an enameled OFFICE sign screwed to it. It was a fourteen-foot silver bullet with an outside staircase built incongruously of filigreed wrought-iron. The door made a sound like an empty beer can when I knocked on it. The same callow male voice I’d heard on the telephone earlier invited me to enter.

  Everything inside was built to scale except the occupant. A midget chipboard desk stood in front of a louvered half-window with a miniature refrigerator placed within arm’s reach. A chintz-covered loveseat pretended to be a sofa against a painted Sheetrock partition separating the office from what was probably a downsized living quarters at the opposite end of the trailer. There was a two-drawer file cabinet too small for the bloated file folders that had drifted on top, and a perky little buzzer of a battery-operated fan pushed air into the face of the young man seated behind the desk talking into the telephone.

  “No, Mrs. Mishak, I didn’t get a request to hold all package deliveries to your trailer. Mobile home, I’m sorry, Mrs. Mishak. Yes, Mrs. Mishak, I realize a pile of packages outside your trailer—your mobile home, excuse me—outside your mobile home while you’re away is bound to get rained on and invite burglars besides. No, Mrs. Mishak, I’m not calling you a liar, I’m sure you made the request. Unfortunately, Mrs. Mishak, I don’t know where it is, because I’ve only been on the job a week, the man who took the request is gone, and I’m up to my ass in paperwork I can’t find.” He stopped talking, blinked. “I understand,

  Mrs. Mishak. I’m sure the owner will be happy to take your complaint. Have a nice day, Mrs. Mishak.”

  He hung up, bent over the telephone, and shouted: “It’s a trailer, you fat old sow! You’re fifty years old and you’re living in a fucking box on wheels!”

  He was too big for that office, but it wasn’t the office’s fault; he was too big for most rooms that didn’t have frescoes painted on the ceiling. He ran about two-fifty in a plain cotton BVD undershirt with his dirty-blonde hair in a ponytail and blue barbed-wire tattoos encircling his biceps. The biceps were as big around as buckets. The artist would have had to go back for more ink. He had a small gold hoop in one ear and a little yellow stubble on his chin, but he smelled of clean sweat and unscented soap. He was in his early twenties.

  “I’m betting she knows all that,” I said. “She’s just dumping the bag out on you.”

  “How the hell would you know?” A pair of blue eyes narrowed to paper cuts.

  “Because I take that kind of call all the time. You don’t have the corner. The only good thing about it is while I’m talking to people like that I’m not burning good gas driving clear out here from Detroit to talk to jackasses like you who don’t know who their friends are.”

  He flexed both arms and I looked around for something to throw at him that wouldn’t just bounce off. There was nothing big enough in the trailer. Then he blew out a lungful of air. The tension went out with it. He nodded. “You’re the detective. Sorry about that. Here.” He opened the little refrigerator, took out two Stroh’s, twisted the top off one, and thumped the other down on my side of the desk.

  I twisted the top off mine and we clinked. The beer was ice cold. Moisture had beaded up on the glass. “You didn’t get that tan behind a desk.” His skin was burned as brown as the bottles.

  “Up until last week I cut the hedges and mowed the paths between the trailers. That suited me just fine. All I had to deal with was thistles and poison ivy. I’m just filling in here as a favor to the owner. When this gig’s finished he’s going to take care of my dog while I’m at Disney World. If I can’t find one that isn’t housebroken I’ll buy one and un-housebreak it. Even at that he’ll have less shit to deal with than I do.”

  “Booth left in a hurry, did he?”

  “I don’t know about that. He just didn’t give much notice. He had this big old bucket of a Plymouth and he just threw a suitcase and a portable typewriter into the back seat and drove away. He didn’t peel rubber and he wasn’t looking back over his shoulder. I couldn’t see him doing that even if he was in a hurry. You could have cut off somebody’s head and put it in the drawer where he kept his bottle and he would have just opened it and frowned because he’d have to move the head to get to the bottle. He wasn’t the hysterical type.”

  “Sounds like you knew him pretty well.”

  “Just to talk to and drink a couple of beers with when it got too hot out to work, like we’re doing. I’m closer friends with that bitch Mishak than I was with Booth.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Sports and politics. He thought most politicians were full of shit and most professional athletes didn’t take enough. He wanted to set up a transfusion.” He had a high thin laugh. It irritated him more than it did me and he poured beer on top of it. In addition to the barbed wire he had a tattoo of a Kewpie doll that stuck out its belly when he bent his arm.

  “He didn’t say anything about himself? A couple of beers every now and then is usually good for a little autobiography. A bottle in the drawer is better.”

  “That was a gag, on account of he said he was a tough-guy writer. If that’s autobiography, I guess you got me. All I ever saw him drink was beer, and no more than two of those at a stretch. I never saw him drunk. What’d he do, write himself a check and sign it Stephen King?”

  “Nothing like that. Someone wants to give him money and I’m supposed to find out where to send it. There’s a few bucks in it for you, too, if you can help.”

  “That’s an old dodge. Just how few?”

  I folded a twenty around one of my business cards and pushed them across the desk. He leaned back and poked them into the change pocket of his jeans without looking at either.

  “I’ve already spent half as much time with you as I did with him all told,” he said. “Those old guys don’t talk about themselves much. I only found out he was a writer because I caught him pecking away once on that beat-up old typer and asked him if he was writing the Great American Novel. He slammed down the lid and said half a dozen guys and one woman already beat him to that. He said the people he wrote about spent all their time bedding blondes and kicking down doors. Then he started talking about the shitty Pistons.”

  “He’s writing again?”

  “Hell, it could’ve been a letter to Ma Bell. He got that lid down so fast I couldn’t swear it wasn’t a sewing machine. I had one beer and got out. I felt like I’d walked in on him jacking off.”

  I was sitting in an orange plastic scoop chair that stuck to my back. The tin trailer was as hot as a kiln. The little fan was blowing me a raspberry. I rolled the cold bottle across my forehead. “So far all I’m getting for my twenty is a bad case of B.O.”

  “He left some stuff behind. It’s in a box in back. I can get it.”

  He stayed put after saying it and I looked at him until he put down his beer and got up and slid around the partition. He had to stoop to keep from colliding with the headliner and the trailer shifted on its springs when he walked to the other end.

  While he was gone I applied beer to my insides and the container to my outside. All over the park windows were open. Somebody was whistling, somebody else was hacking up last night’s smoke, the Jeffersons were moving on up to the East Side, a kid with a cardboard ear was blowing a trombone. What sounded like a neighborhood soccer game was going on someplace where trailers had not yet gone in, complete with body blows and adolescent voices trying out their Martin Scorsese vocabulary. It was another spring, and here I was pushing around Andrew Jackson and waiting for him to push back, just as I had been doing in January.

  The big man came back carrying a fiberboard carton with the big Seagram’s 7 stenciled on it in red. When he plunked it down on the desk I lifted my chin to see over the open top. It looked like the usual junk people leave behind. If it were worth anything at all to anyone it would have gone with them. That’s the trouble with detective work. You have to find out where they went to get a look at the thing
s that might tell you where they went.

  “Just books and cassette tapes,” he said. “The books are falling apart and even the cassettes are held together with Scotch tape; he must have played the hell out of them. His taste in music was all over the map.”

  He sat down to finish his beer while I reached inside without looking, grab-bag fashion, and brought out a flat rectangle of stiff plastic. The cassette was played three-quarters through. The label read LYNYRD SKYNYRD. Yellowed strips of transparent tape were folded over the corners.

  I went back for more. Three cassettes this time: Reba McEntire, Santana, an album of Christmas songs played on bagpipe by the Scots Greys military band. The top corners of each wore strips of tape. My host must have been a CD man not to know what that meant.

  Not that it meant anything that would do me any good. I dropped the tapes back into the box and sat back. “Was he chummy with any of the residents?”

  “Not if he was smart. A lot of them are retired. Their kids don’t come to see them and all they need is a friendly excuse to drop into the office and bend your ear for three hours. Then there’s the scum that gives trailer parks a bad name. If you snuggle up to them you run the risk of getting nailed as an accomplice in a beef for receiving stolen goods, and if you get on their blind side you can wind up with a couple of slugs in you.” He lifted his bottle to his lips, but he didn’t swig from it. “Well, there was Fleta Skirrett.”

  “You made up that name.” But I was reaching for my notebook and pen.

  “I don’t have that much imagination. She lived in thirty-six, over in the next row. Not bad to look at, if you like your meat fat. Booth went over there to make repairs two or three times a week. Nothing breaks down that often. None of the trailers here are more than ten years old.”

  “Romance?”

  “All I know is he never put on a clean shirt to visit any of the others.”

  “Thirty-six, you said?”

  “Until last month. She was starting to get a little screwy, cranking up the TV late at night and leaving her keys in the door. After the cops found her wandering down Merriman in pink mules and a flannel nightie her family came and got her. She’s in a home somewhere now, I guess.”

  “No forwarding?”

  He shook his head. “She picked up her Social Security checks from a box at the Belleville Post Office. You might try there.”

  I wrote Fleta Skirrett in the notebook and put a question mark next to it. While I was doing that the telephone rang. “What else have you got?” I asked.

  He shook his head, said hello into the receiver, said “Shit” under his breath, then: “Yes, Mrs. Mishak. The furnace?” He leaned back and turned his head to read the thermometer mounted outside the window. “No, Mrs. Mishak, I don’t guess it would be firing, seeing as how it’s eighty-two degrees outside. Well, if you’re cold, why don’t you open a window in your trailer and let some of that heat in? Motor home, I’m sorry.…”

  I left him holding the receiver in one hand and gripping the neck of his beer bottle with the other in a stranglehold.

  4

  Rush hour had the area by the throat when I got away from there, and I smoked a third of a pack of cigarettes while creeping along in the crush after the driver of a 16,000-pound tractor-trailer rig fell asleep, jumped the median, and plowed into the outbound traffic heading west. A medevac helicopter from the University of Michigan Hospital drifted down near the scene as passing drivers slowed to a crawl to get a glimpse of tangled steel and spilled brains. It would do as an outlet until bear baiting came back into fashion.

  A tired female clerk at the Belleville Post Office had told me Fleta Skirrett had filed a change-of-address from a P.O. box to the Edencrest Retirement Home in Marshall, eighty miles west of Detroit, but that Eugene Booth still maintained his box in Belleville. That was a break I hoped I wouldn’t need; staking out the lobby the third of the month in case Booth came in for his government checks was right up there with having my prostate examined.

  After the traffic jam broke up I bailed out at a suburban mall with a Best Buy and bought a cheap tape player from a hyper young salesman in a Tasmanian Devil necktie. Back home I shooed a salesman out of the office who wanted to set me up with a DNA testing kit, drew a leaf out of the desk to put my feet up on, and finished reading Paradise Valley in one sitting. Officer Roland Clifford, the hero of the story, was beaten half to death by the lynch mob, who had then taken the three innocent black defense workers from his custody and torn them apart. The final trial scene, during which a pale and angry Clifford, his head shaved and bandaged, gave testimony against the defendants, was even more tense than the violence. The story came to an end with the conviction of the three ringleaders and Clifford’s promotion to detective sergeant. From there he had gone on to lieutenant, then inspector, and finally precinct commander, and following his retirement had appeared often at ceremonies with various black community leaders as a symbol of racial harmony. He had been dead ten years and the NAACP and the Detroit Chamber of Commerce were discussing changing the name of a section of Outer Drive to Roland Clifford Street in his honor.

  That last part was straight history, and postdated Booth’s book. The narrative ended in a seedy resort motor hotel on Black Lake near the tip of Michigan’s middle finger, with Clifford reading about the verdict in the newspapers while recovering from his injuries. It wasn’t really a happy ending; the blameless dead were still dead, and the rage and intolerance that had led to the tragedy continued to bubble beneath the surface of the World War Two homefront. Whatever rays of hope found their way into Booth’s world did so through a dirty window.

  Dusk was drifting in. An old building is the most efficient telegraph system in the world: On all three floors empty swivel chairs rolled to a rest, file drawers boomed shut, light switches snapped off, stairs creaked under feet heading heavily home. In a little while the cleaning service would arrive, and then would begin the jet-engine whine of vacuum cleaners and whoosh-whoosh of the superintendent’s broom on the foyer floor as he cycled the dirt and twigs and dead butts back to the street. There was nothing keeping me there except the thought of an empty house and two pounds of hamburger thawing in the sink. I switched on the gooseneck lamp, reached into the John King bag, came out with Deadtime Story, and read six chapters. This one was about an accountant on the run from the Mafia, or the Syndicate, as Booth called it. The accountant was a decent guy who happened to be good with numbers, and whose love for recording long columns of figures and magically transforming them into sums at the bottoms had obscured the realization that he was working for a mob boss who contracted murder as casually as a cab driver ordered a hot dog in a diner. When an attempt was made on the accountant’s life to shut him up, he woke up and took off with the books.

  I stopped reading just as he and the ledgers were fleeing north of the city in search of a place to hide. My eyes were scratching in their sockets, but that wasn’t why I stopped reading. Something had begun to grow, and I thought that if I kept reading it would shrivel. I tried to look at the thing, but it stopped growing when it was being watched. I needed to quit thinking about it. Whatever it was, it would have to finish fleshing itself out in the dark, like a potato.

  I’d brought in a fistful of cassette tapes from the box the trailer park manager had given me. I put batteries in the tape player, selected one of the cassettes at random—George Takei Sings the Best of the Beatles, or some such thing—poked it into the slot, and hit the play button.

  Buying blank cassettes can be expensive if you’re in the habit of doing a lot of recording. Audiophiles who are always taping music off the radio or transcribing it from compact discs and long-playing albums often stretch a dollar by buying pre-recorded cassettes at yard and garage sales, snapping Scotch tape over the holes on the top corners where the tabs have been removed to avoid accidentally recording over the title tracks, and using them in place of blanks. I’d done it myself and had a number of cassettes in my collection that l
ooked just like the ones that had belonged to Eugene Booth. If what I had in the player sounded anything like Mr. Sulu’s rendition of “Yellow Submarine,” or Patsy Cline if she was more to the preference of a seventy-year-old tough-guy writer, I’d wasted Louise Starr’s money at Best Buy.

  What I had was silence, a lot of it, then the whir of air stirring around a microphone, followed by what might have been the legs of a chair scraping a floor and then a groaning sigh like a soul crying in hell or an old man sitting down. A throat got cleared, a long gargling acceleration broken in the middle by a cough, sharp as a pistol report. Some fumbling with the mike, then a low fuzzy bass that might once have been rich and pleasant, the voice of a fair roadhouse singer-pianist before too much whiskey, too many cigarettes, and three or more trips too many around a rundown block had hammered it into that dull monotone you hear at last call and over the loudspeaker in the eleventh inning of a pitchers’ duel:

  “Midnight, now, past curfew. Even the sirens are tired and sound as if they want to go home. They’re saying … What the hell are they saying? What do they ever say besides ‘eeyow’? Jesus, Booth. And why’s it have to be midnight? Nothing ever happens at midnight except lousy poetry and a trip to the can. If that’s the best you can do you might as well write a crappy horror novel and let ‘em stick a skull on the cover. All the really horrifying things happen in broad daylight. Well, hell, there’s my opener: ‘All the really horrifying things happen’—no, truly—’All the truly horrifying things’—no, no, fuck that, that’s a goddamn romance word. ‘All the really horrifying things happen in broad daylight.’ Drink to that.” Rattle of an old-fashioned church key against a metal bottle cap, sharp gasp of carbonation released into the air, then the gurgle gle and the little sucking sound of lips pulling away from the neck of a bottle. I could almost smell the beer. “ ‘.… happen in broad daylight.’ Paragraph. ‘Hollywood doesn’t think so. Movies with murder in them have to start at night or they waste too much footage getting to the melodrama. That’s unless they can get Gable or Cooper; then the sky’s the budget. But this isn’t a story for Cooper or Gable.’