A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Note: Substitute someone contemporary for Cooper and Gable; Cruise and some other twerp. Mustn’t limit the readership to old farts and blue-haired ladies who don’t mind if a little acting gets in the way of the special effects. How to do that without taking people out of the story? Put Cruise in their heads and they’ll shit the first time someone climbs aboard a streetcar. This is harder than I remember.” Something creaked; a man’s weight shifting in his seat. “Three minutes gone. At this rate I’ll finish behind Margaret Mitchell and that old bat who wrote about the ladies’ club. …”

  He picked up his rhythm a little later, dictating whole paragraphs with only a few pauses to substitute a word or rearrange a phrase. Some of it had a familiar ring and I realized I’d read some of the same material in Paradise Valley. I’d heard somewhere that when a writer begins to plagiarize himself he’s on his way out. I couldn’t credit it. There always seemed to be three or four people on the bestseller list who had been writing the same book since the beginning of their careers. He opened and emptied two more bottles of beer while I was listening, but the alcohol didn’t appear to affect his speech or his thinking. A system accustomed to hard liquor absorbs plain hops like a bar rag. Anyway, apart from an interesting glimpse into the interior machinery of the creative mind, I didn’t get much out of that tape or the one I substituted for it a little later, aside from the conviction that the thing that was growing like a potato in the moist dark corner of my subconscious was still putting out sprouts. I decided to go home and not think about it a little longer. I deliberately left behind Booth’s books and the cassettes and the player so I wouldn’t be tempted.

  I forgot about the dusty old books in the fiberboard carton on the back seat, though. It caught my eye when I got out in my garage, but I have an iron will. I left it there all the time I was preparing meatloaf from my grandmother’s Gypsy recipe and all through dinner. It was no help. The point was not to think about Eugene Booth at all and I couldn’t not do it with the paraphernalia sitting ten feet away on the other side of the firewall. I washed down dinner with a second bottle of beer and went out and lugged in the carton.

  Sitting in my one good armchair in the living room drinking my post-prandial Scotch, I hoisted one of the cloth-bound books out of the carton beside the chair and opened it in my lap. The spine was split and the paper gave off a smell of dry must that reminded me of the air in John King’s bookshop. The title, Causes and Repercussions of the Detroit Riot, June 20-21, 1943, was as catchy as a yarn worm on a paper hook. It was a privately published report addressed to Frank Murphy, former Detroit political strongman and then justice of the United States Supreme Court, prepared by an associate professor of Social Studies employed at Wayne University, since renamed Wayne State. Following the title page was a 133-page chronological history and statistical breakdown of the situation and events that had culminated in the day-and-a-half racial brawl that swept the city while the Second World War was in full cry. The upshot, once the population figures were weeded out and the demographic vocabulary was rendered down into plain English, was that the close proximity of Negro and white defense workers in the converted automobile plants had created friction that burst into flames following an altercation between a white and a black motorist on the Belle Isle bridge. In flat pedantic language, the educator managed to make the deaths of thirty-five people—twenty-nine of them Negroes—over a thirty-six-hour period sound as dull as the annual mean rainfall in British Honduras. Without footnotes or statistics, Booth had managed to do far more with just one image: a scene of a carload of transplanted white Kentuckians quartering the neighborhoods for black prey with shotguns across their laps. The picture was seared into my memory as if the ghost of Francisco Goya had been summoned forth to paint it in scarlet and indigo; as if I had witnessed the act that had inspired it.

  Booth, or someone who had owned the book before him, had been impressed enough with the report to highlight whole sections in yellow. Some whole pages were set off in this way, so that it seemed it would have been much easier to strike out the passages that held no interest and save the rest.

  The next book I looked at covered the same subject, but more sensationally. It was shabbily bound in dirty green cloth with the cardboard corners poking through, with a tattered paper dust jacket painted in orange and black, showing comic caricature black faces with banjo eyes being pursued by a single redheaded Neanderthal in a torn BVD undershirt carrying a blackjack. Gore dripped from the letters of the title: Hell in Detroit. The copyright was August 1943, but I didn’t need it to recognize a slap-up job intended to capitalize on a hot story before news from the foreign front dumped water on it. The prose did that. The author’s name, Jack McCord, had pseudonym all over it. Whoever he was, whatever name he’d signed on his checks, he was in love with exclamation points and italics. Booth or his predecessor hadn’t bothered to highlight a single one.

  There were four more books in the box, three of them trade paperbacks with creased and thumbsmeared covers. One was a mainstream novel about the riot, written by an author whose name I recognized, in a style that was both literary and restrained. The others were standard histories of Detroit. A highlighter had been used on chapters dealing with the riot. The novel wasn’t highlighted. Booth—and I was sure it was him now, unless he’d acquired all the books from one man with one pen—only plagiarized himself.

  The first day of any missing persons investigation is mostly catch-up. You have to find out who a man is and where he’s been and what he’s been up to before you can find out where he’s gone. I only had a little of the first three, but then I’d only been working since lunchtime. The books might have been left over from his original research for Paradise Valley, except the three trade paperbacks and the hardcover literary novel had all been copyrighted years after Eugene Booth had stopped writing professionally, and the yellow highlighter pen hadn’t yet been invented when he was laying the groundwork for his paperback thriller. Nor had cassette recording tapes, but he had been dictating something onto them that sounded a lot like Paradise Valley, albeit with a twist that was new and if anything more sinister.

  Sinister. A Eugene Booth word if ever there was one. I was tired from all the driving and talking and reading, but if I went to bed in the frame of mind I was in I’d be lucky not to have that rough droning voice playing through my head all night. I heard plenty enough voices as it was.

  I dumped everything back into the carton, swept the dust off my lap, and turned on the TV. The sitcoms were too shrill and I didn’t understand the teenage soap opera, so I watched the second half of a theatrical movie that had been carved open to insert commercials and then the eleven o’clock news as far as the weather. The forecast for tomorrow was more of the same, good weather for driving. That made up my mind for me and I turned in knowing what I was going to be doing the next day.

  Lying between the cool sheets I thought I knew too much about where Eugene Booth had been just before he sent back Louise Starr’s check and lit out with his portable typewriter and too little about where he’d been and what he’d done between finishing his last novel and coming to work at the White Pine Mobile Home Park. That meant at least another day of catching up, and moving in the wrong direction to boot. Whatever good it did me or didn’t, it would have something to do with an old woman in Marshall who was losing her mind.

  5

  Eugene Booth was waiting for me on the floor of my office when I got in at eight. Standing in the doorway I tore open the manila envelope from the Michigan Secretary of State’s office and looked at his face on the duplicate of his driver’s license, broad and flushed under a good head of iron-gray hair, brushed straight back and receding at the temples. He wore square glasses with heavy black rims and the scowl people used to assume for official photographs before the people who took them loosened up enough to tell them to smile. He had a strong thick nose that looked as if it might have been broken once, although I’d have to see it in profile to be sure. He remin
ded me of someone. I couldn’t think who. I had the odd sensation that whoever it was I didn’t know his name.

  Included was a Xerox copy of Booth’s motor vehicle registration. He was driving a 1979 Plymouth, mint green, with a white vinyl top. I figured I’d know it when I saw it.

  I went to the desk and stood there long enough to call Louise at the number she’d given me and file my report. A fresh chirpy voice answered and put her on right away. It was all business. She thanked me and said I didn’t have to call again unless I had something important. I was in a hurry to get on the road to Marshall. When I cradled the receiver three minutes after I’d dialed I should have felt relief.

  An excavation crew had erected a twelve-foot pile of red earth on the asphalt of the deserted service station across the street where I usually parked my car. They were going to scrap the subterranean gasoline tanks so they wouldn’t collapse under someone with a good lawyer, fill in the hole, knock down the glazed brick building that had been boarded up for years, and put up a KFC or something similar in its place. With the casinos and the new baseball park coming in downtown, the center of the city had begun to pry open its gummy eyes and gape its toothless mouth in a yawn and stretch its wasted limbs toward the sun. I didn’t know how long my little building would be able to hold out, with its gargoyles on the roof and its fossil on the third floor. For the time being I was using whatever meter I could find and feeding it quarters every two hours or so, just in case the doctor’s caduceus I had clipped to the visor didn’t work.

  Somewhere past Belleville and the site of my interview with the groundskeeper-turned-park-manager, the Edsel Ford stopped being the Edsel Ford and became plain old I-94. It hadn’t been resurfaced since it was built to ferry defense workers to the Ford B-17 plant at Willow Run, and now M-DOT crews were sweating day and night to peel it down to its original concrete and build it back up from bedrock. At that hour the traffic was light coming from Detroit and I didn’t lose much more than ten miles an hour waiting my turn to thread through the lane closures and temporary shunts to the inbound. Rollovers and running gun battles were confined to peak traffic times.

  It was two and a half hours to Marshall and I made it with the help of a local jazz program on NPR and then a Ted Hawkins tape in the deck to avoid the news from the current hotspot in the eastern hemisphere. There were long stretches of flat green farmland dotted with stately old barns in various tragic stages of disintegration, with here and there a sprawling multiplex theater sprung up from what used to be a drivein, bravely trying to fill all its parking spaces; they’d have had to program a new Batman and three or four Titanics, and even then they’d have room left over for Woodstock. What we do best in America is waste space.

  Marshall was founded by German farmers, and the city fathers work very hard to remind people of the fact. A long winding route leads off the expressway and through the business section, dominated by an enormous restaurant built along Bavarian lines, with exposed timbers and Wienerschnitzel on the menu. With it behind me I consulted my scribbled directions briefly and turned down a tree-shaded cul-de-sac lined with modest brick houses and ending before a long low L-shaped building of golden brick with ornamental shutters on the windows and EDENCREST RETIREMENT HOME painted in elegant script on a sign pegged to the front lawn. There was paved parking for twenty cars, half of which was taken up by what were probably employee vehicles; the visitors’ slots stood as good a chance of filling up as any of the multiplex lots.

  I parked next to an EMS unit that was doing its best to look like an ordinary van, with its Christmas-tree lights placed discreetly between the head- and taillamps, got out, peeled my shirt away from my back and shook it, and put on my sportcoat. I used my reflection in the glass door in front of the building to adjust the knot of my tie. Older people in general interpret a little formality as a sign of respect.

  The place was air-conditioned, but the temperature wasn’t more than three or four degrees lower than outside; the elderly chilled easily. A light fresh potpourri had been laid in over the Lysol. A door marked OFFICE stood open to the right and I entered a small room with two visitors’ chairs on steel frames and a painted steel desk. Tacked to the wall a bright-colored poster with a photo of a killer whale flashing its baleens informed me that I was dressed for any occasion as long as I was wearing a smile. A leathery-faced young woman with tightly coiled red hair smiled up at me from behind the desk, setting the example. She wore a yellow T-shirt with a smiling sun printed on it and had been writing on a sheet attached to a clipboard braced against the desk when I came in. White plastic letters snapped to a nameplate on my side of the desk read MRS. MILBOCKER. She transferred the smile to the card I gave her, then returned the smile to me.

  “The detective,” she said. “Did you have any trouble finding the place?”

  “No, your directions were fine.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. So many of our guests’ families seem to get lost and don’t show up.”

  “That’s the policy, is it?”

  “It has to be. Once you start to chew over human nature it’s difficult to be cheerful for the sake of the guests. I don’t imagine your work is all that different.”

  “I only have to be cheerful for my own sake. It’s easier on the smile muscles.”

  “They say it takes fewer to smile than it does to frown. The people who say that never worked in a retirement home.” She glanced down at the clipboard. “It’s Miss Skirrett you wanted to see?”

  “It is. I still do. Is she up to receiving visitors?”

  “She’s holding court in the TV room. I’ll take you.”

  Mrs. Milbocker had large hips in tight faded jeans with a daisy stitched on one hip pocket. I figured her for a flower child during the Age of Aquarius. We walked briskly down a wide hallway with stainless steel rails on both sides. The door to each numbered room was painted a different color, probably to assist confused residents in finding their way back to their rooms. She stopped to touch the wrist of a bony old man in a heavy sweater who was dozing in a wheelchair and yell a glad word into his hearing aid. I was pretty sure she’d been looking for a pulse. He came awake, lifted his trifocals to see her at a better angle, and asked when they were serving supper.

  “It’s morning, Mr. Goldstein. Lunch in two hours.”

  “Shit, I’ll be dead by then.” He went back into his fetal curl.

  “Mr. Goldstein was the first American on Corregidor,” Mrs. Milbocker said as we resumed our journey. “He can still smell it, he says. He says that’s the part the movies can’t get, the stink of blasted-open bodies.”

  I said, “I imagine you learn a lot in this job.”

  “If we could harness the life experience in this one building, we’d be on Mars by now.”

  We made a wide circle around a knot of residents gathered in front of a pair of double doors secured with a cable lock. Most of them were in wheelchairs. Two or three stood grasping the steel wall rail as if letting go would pitch them down a steep cliff. The women’s hair was coiffed in a variety of exotic styles; practice for local beauty-school students. Most of the men wore bright golfing caps with fuzzy balls on top.

  Mrs. Milbocker said, “I gave up trying to shoo them away from the lunch room my second week here. They start drifting toward it exactly two hours before each meal. Most of them don’t have watches, and the ones who do never look at them. They just know. Poor dears, we try to keep them occupied and entertained, but eating’s the only thing that holds their interest; eating and looking forward to eating. When it doesn’t interest them anymore we know they’re getting ready to leave us.”

  “It must be tough to watch.”

  “It is if you think about it. I stopped doing that my third week. These days I think of it as working in a hotel: They check in, they check out.”

  “I notice you don’t call them by their first names.”

  “I didn’t learn that here. My parents taught me. It’s called respect. Here we are.”
r />   We’d stopped before a doorway without a door. The room inside was a little larger than the average living room, with armchairs and sofas upholstered in green and yellow and orange Naugahyde arranged in front of a cabinet TV set with a twenty-three-inch screen. A morning show was playing, with a fat comic in a chef’s hat showing the perky blonde hostess how to boil eggs, but the sound was off. A couple of the residents in the seats were watching the screen, but three or four others were looking at a woman who was even fatter than the comic, sitting on the end of the orange couch jingling the ice cubes in a tall glass of what looked like iced tea and talking with both hands. Her hair, teased, sprayed, and dyed cotton-candy pink, brought back memories of Carroll Baker, but her fat face and the massive arms jiggling out of the holes in her sleeveless yellow dress belonged more to Gertrude Stein. A pair of silver-framed glasses on a chain around her neck lay horizontal on her bosom. The long story she was telling about the time her girlfriend locked the keys in the car when they were crossing the Straits of Mackinac on the ferry amused her more than it did her listeners, but what should have been a foghorn bray of a laugh issuing from that flesh mountain was a tinkly little-girl giggle, hardly a bubble in the stream of her high breathy Marilyn Monroe speech. Coming down the hall overhearing her I’d thought a cartoon was playing.

  I’d come into it in the middle, but it didn’t seem to be much of a story, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Those who joined in when she laughed missed a beat, reacting more to her glee than to the detail that had prompted it. The entertainment lay in watching her entertain herself.

  I took advantage of a brief pause while Fleta Skir-rett sipped iced tea to murmur in Mrs. Milbocker’s ear. “I was told she was beginning to lose it.”