A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

by Loren D. Estleman

  12

  I went back into Two. I wanted to wait for dark before I made my move. I wasn’t sure why, unless it was habit. If it weren’t for Cabin Five I’d have been knocking on Four as soon as the door closed.

  The television was still playing without sound. A teenage local anchorman mouthed words off a TelePrompTer, a graphic showing behind him of a gun clamped in a Popeye fist. I switched off the set. There were more than enough guns at the Angler’s Inn that day. The air was damp cold and I cranked up the thermostat attached to the radiator under the window and put my hand on the rough metal until it began to get warm. I hadn’t eaten in six hours. I’d brought a Thermos and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, but I left them in the sack. I wanted my blood going to my head where I needed it.

  I stood at the window and watched the light recede from the surface of the lake. From that angle I couldn’t see my fisherman, but he’d be reeling in his line for the last time and recovering his creel from the water if he’d caught anything. The water turned an eggplant shade of purple, then slowly went to black as if the shadows of the pines had spread to cover the lake, like a grounds crew unrolling a tarpaulin across the infield. I looked at my watch for no particular reason and had to snap on a lamp to read it. That was my signal to go visiting.

  A twenty-five-watt bulb burned in a wrought-iron carriage lamp above the door to Cabin Four, illuminating little but itself and the brass numeral nailed to the door. The shade was still drawn in the window, but there was light behind it. Five was dark. I couldn’t see what was going on in the window there, but the chances were better than fifty percent I was being observed.

  I cocked my head, listening to the out-of-rhythm clacking on the other side of the door. It sounded like a machine-gunner getting bored. It was an oddly soothing noise, like the crack of an old-fashioned wooden baseball bat or the clip-clop of hooves hauling a hay-wagon. You hardly ever hear a manual typewriter anymore.

  I hesitated before knocking. I’d forgotten which old poet had failed to finish his most famous verse because someone had knocked at his door.

  The hell with it. He probably wouldn’t have finished the damn thing anyway. I knocked, three sharp raps; a confident combination, but not threatening. When I write my memoirs I’m going to include an entire chapter on knocks, from the shave-and-a-haircut of the cocky, gum-chewing best friend to the heavy hammering of the cop in a flak jacket. I’d used them all.

  “Yes.”

  No footsteps accompanied the response.

  I had one of my business cards ready. I stooped and poked it under the door.

  A long silence followed and I wondered if he’d seen the card. Then floorboards shifted inside, a leather sole scraped wood, and a shadow broke the light coming out above the threshold. There was a little grunt, as might be made by a man who didn’t bend over without thinking about it first, then another silence that was longer than required to read the three words and two numbers printed on the card.

  The deadbolt slid back with an oily snick and the door came open the width of a broad face with a hypertensive flush and glasses with heavy black rims. He had the same scowl he’d worn for his driver’s license picture. A puff of whiskey came out with the cedar smell from inside.

  “Your name is Walker?” It was the flat roughened baritone of the cassette tapes.

  I showed him the state ID and my county buzzer. He tilted his head back slightly to use the lower half of his bifocals. He made the same grunt he’d made when he picked up the card. “Fancier than it used to be,” he said. “You could still have fixed it up at Kinko’s. Where’d you get the star? That’s illegal for a private investigator in this state.”

  “It wasn’t when I got it. They forgot to ask for it back when the law changed. I’m working for Louise Starr.” I put away the folder and showed him his note to her.

  He grunted again. “I’ve still got a ream of that cheap-jack stationery I stole from the Alamo. Don’t know why I didn’t toss it when I quit writing. Maybe I knew even then I’d wind up quitting quitting. What’s the matter, couldn’t she read? I sent back the check.”

  “She wants to know why.”

  “I couldn’t make it any clearer.”

  “ ‘A gelding ought to know better than to try to breed.’ If that’s as clear as you’re writing these days, it’s no wonder you quit.”

  “That’s the idea, Sherlock. I’m dried up. Spent. No more lead in my pencil. How clear do you want it? I can’t write anymore.”

  “There isn’t anything in the contract about writing. She was buying an old book.”

  “That’s how it starts. They manage somehow not to lose money on it and the next thing you know they’re beating down your door asking you to write something fresh. I made my peace with all that years before you climbed on an egg crate to peek through your first keyhole. I’ve got blocked arteries to my heart. I don’t care to blow them fighting the same old battle.”

  “What were you typing just now, your grocery list? Can’t read your own handwriting?”

  “I’m just doodling. Just because a leg’s been amputated doesn’t mean you don’t want to scratch when it itches.”

  “It must itch bad. You filled up half a dozen tapes dictating and wore out a highlighter researching the same history you already used to write Paradise Valley.”

  His face flushed alarmingly deeper. “That weed-whacking son of a bitch. You’ve been to White Pine.”

  “It says on the card I’m a detective.”

  “Well, you did your job. You found me. Go tell Mrs. Starr no one’s holding a gun to my head and I didn’t join a cult. That way you get paid and I’m let the hell alone.”

  He started to push the door shut. I leaned against it, but he was ready for that and he was leaning from the other side. He was built closer to the ground and as strong as an ornery bull. I spoke into the narrowing gap.

  “You’re not either alone. You’re being watched. And not just by me.”

  The door sprang back open. “Cabin Five?”

  “That’s the one.”

  He stood aside to let me in, then closed the door behind me and twisted the deadbolt home. He surprised me by not poking his head out to look at the cabin on the other side of the office. It made him seem a little less like a civilian.

  Booth’s cabin looked like mine. His bed was built on a maple frame, not iron, with fish inexpertly painted on the headboard, and a gateleg table with a straight-back chair drawn up to it stood in the spot that the armchair occupied in Two, with a fat lamp on it, good for tying flies or writing postcards. A Winslow Homer seascape hung above the bed. Aside from that there was the same machine-made Indian rug, the bathroom in the same place, the same curtains framing a slightly different view of the lake.

  He wasn’t tying flies or writing postcards. A battered old black portable typewriter minus its case squatted on the gateleg table with a tall stack of paper on one side and a shorter one on the other. I recognized the coarse yellowing Alamo stock and Booth’s thick scribble on the wide margin at the bottom of a typed page. I also recognized the big red Seagram’s numeral 7 on the label of the open bottle standing out of range of the typewriter’s carriage. It belonged to the box I’d seen him carrying in earlier; the unopened bottles still inside were helping hold down one corner of the rug.

  I smelled evergreen and whiskey and cigarettes. A pile of butts formed a dome in a copper ashtray on the table next to an open pack of Pall Malls. His suitcase, a scuffed old blue model with discolored white piping, was parked in the bottom of the narrow open closet with his twill jacket and a rumpled old raincoat suspended above it on wire hangers. The raincoat made me think of something, but I didn’t know what. The radiator was starting to make headway against the evening chill. He’d have turned it up the same time I had mine.

  Booth saw me taking stock. “Place hasn’t gotten any prettier since Kennedy. It used to be done in early Geronimo. There was a peace pipe on the wall and a wooden spear and a squat butt-ugly ce
dar redskin with a hollow in his head for an ashtray. I loved it. I like this okay. You don’t want anything beautiful or even tasteful to distract you. Almost anything’s easier to look at than a blank sheet of paper.”

  “This the same cabin where you wrote Some of My Best Friends Are Killers?”

  If I expected him to rise to that one he disappointed me. “At one time or another I wrote in all of them, including dear old departed Number One. Don’t expect me to tell you what I wrote in which. Any old whore in a storm.” He went into the bathroom and left the door open while he used the toilet. His prostate sounded healthy. “You one of these new non-drinking detectives?” he called out above the trickling stream.

  “I’m not a new anything. I’ve got ice in my cabin.”

  “Well, it’s not doing either of us any good over there.”

  I went out while he was washing his hands. The GMC truck was still in front of Five but there was no light coming from the cabin. Either he retired early for a city boy or he’d turned it off to improve his view through the window. I couldn’t tell if the shade was still drawn.

  When I came back with the ice, Booth had unwrapped a second glass from the bathroom and placed it next to his, which had some amber residue in the bottom. The fermented-grain smell was sharper than it had been. He’d made a fresh deposit while I was gone.

  As he poured, his broken-nosed profile told me what I’d been thinking of earlier. It belonged to the tough in the trenchcoat on the covers of all his books. Lowell Birdsall had gone no farther than the author for his inspiration.

  “I love that crack when the whiskey first hits the ice,” he said. “It’s like the spring break-up in the mountains.”

  “I said something just like that this morning. The person I said it to said I talk too much about drinking.”

  “Woman, right? They’re the ones that give a shit. I bet she had you all wrapped up in a rubber sheet taking the cure. Everything’s a disease now. Me, I’m just a drunk. I tried writing this book on beer, but I couldn’t fool it. You need at least eighty proof to break things loose.” He pulled the chair out from under the table, turned it around, handed me my drink, and sat down.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and lifted my glass. “What to?”

  “Bullshit.” He drank down a third of his glass. The ice prevented him from emptying it in one draft.

  I sipped. The orange glow filled my head like a balloon. I should’ve eaten the sandwiches. I decided to take it slow. “So you are writing a book.”

  “I’m spoiling perfectly good paper. When I’ve spoiled enough of it I’ll have something that may someday be a book. God knows we need another one of those. You know, Robert Benchley couldn’t bear to spend more than a minute in a bookstore. He said someone wrote each book expecting it to be the book that would make all the others irrelevant. Then it went up on a shelf with the rest and he could hear them all calling to him. In the end he couldn’t bring himself even to enter a store. Ordered all his books by mail.”

  “He drank himself to death, I heard.”

  “Drinking never killed anybody. There has to be a finger on the trigger.” He took down another third.

  That made me think of the man in the Yankees cap. “You knew about Cabin Five?”

  “I had FBI agents following me everywhere I went for two years after Bullets Are My Business came out. My detective went to bed with a sexy communist and I didn’t kill either of them. You get so you know when you’re under a glass.”

  “I had a two-minute conversation with this guy by accident. If he’s a fed he took a course on how to talk like a regular American.”

  “Never happen. They don’t pick ‘em for their imagination.” He took a thoughtful sip, leaving some whiskey in the bottom of the glass. “You don’t suppose your client is doubling up on you?”

  I drank a little to look as if I were keeping up. “She’s got faith in me. Besides, she can’t afford it. She could barely afford to pay you the advance you threw back in her face.”

  “I didn’t. You’ve got the note. Well, I’m buffaloed. I haven’t been with a woman in ten years, so it isn’t a jealous husband. Even if there were jealous husbands anymore. Country’s gone so far toward hell if I wrote the way I wrote back when I could write, no self-respecting horny kid would bother to hide one of my books under his mattress.”

  “Maybe he’s a fan.”

  “Maybe I’m Leo fucking Tolstoy.” He drank up, then frowned at my glass. “There’s dust on top of your booze, son. Don’t tell me you’re one of these punks drinks Jack and Coke.” He twisted in his seat, scooped up the bottle, and refilled us both. His hand was steady enough to pour nitroglycerine.

  “One of us ought to go easy. I’m pretty sure this guy is heeled.”

  “ ‘Heeled.’” He blew through his nose. “You’ve been reading too much Booth. You say he’s got a gat, a heater, a rod, a roscoe, a piece? I never knew a cop or a crook to call it anything but a gun.”

  “That was before you guys changed the language.”

  “The language changes itself. You can’t tip a can up over it and keep it in, that’s the trouble. I’ve got a hundred brand-new pages that read like Middle English: Coffin nails instead of cigarettes, streetsweepers instead of shotguns. A car’s a crate, a bodyguard’s a goon, a corpse is meat. You should’ve seen what I went through when I had to write about a real heater or a crate or a hunk of meat in a skillet. Dames instead of girls. Well, women. If I ever called Allison a dame, she’d’ve brained me with Webster’s Second.”

  He went silent then and drank. He wasn’t as sober as he looked. Bringing up his wife had kicked the braces out from behind the canvas front. He let his chin fall to his chest. He might have been faking it to discourage questions. That made it time to ask one that counted.

  “Did you ever find out who killed her?”

  His head came up in millimeters, as if he were raising it with a winch. The shelf of crisp gray hair had fallen onto his forehead and his eyes glared out from under it through the thick lenses of his glasses with a sudden naked lucidity.

  “She was just a stamp to them. A lousy one-center on a postcard. The bastards didn’t even care who else read it as long as I got the message.”

  “What message?”

  The winch let go then and his chin drifted back down. He made purring noises with his lips and the glass in his hand tilted, slopping some of its contents onto the Indian rug. I got up and took it from him and carried it and mine into the bathroom and emptied them into the sink. He was snoring loudly and with enthusiasm when I came back out; his head was all the way back now and I saw his molars. I screwed the cap back on the bottle. That would slow him down half a second.

  I left the cabin and pulled the door shut until it locked. I couldn’t turn the bolt. I hoped he’d wake up enough to do that later. I glanced toward Cabin Five. I made it a long look. The cabin was still dark and the pickup camper was gone. He had a quiet motor. I hadn’t even heard him pull out.

  13

  The few hits of Seagram’s I’d taken were still ringing in my skull. I wasn’t hungry by then, but to absorb the alcohol I ate the sandwiches I’d brought and drank all the coffee in the Thermos before going to bed. The mattress was too soft and the springy metal slats creaked like ship’s rigging whenever I turned over. It was going to be a long night.

  Wrong again.

  Something was knocking against the hull of my fishing boat. I lay on the deck staring up at the bright sky and tried to ignore it, but after a little silence the knocking came again: five rapid raps, confidence mixed with impatience. It wasn’t just a piece of driftwood clunking against the waterline.

  I opened my eyes to the dazzle of the sun bounding off the lake. I hadn’t closed the curtains over the window. Dust-motes swarmed like tiny bright golden bees as far up as the exposed rafters. Out across the water someone was trying to pull-start an outboard motor and not having much luck; there would be a series of half-hearted pops followed by a cl
ank-clank and an emphysemic wheeze and then a pause before he tried again. For a second I thought that was the noise that awoke me. Then again the five knocks, blows now with the side of the fist, hard enough to bounce the panels.

  “Eight o’clock, Petunia! Breakfast call! Rise and shine and grab your pants.”

  I’d gone first for the Smith & Wesson on the belt of my jeans crumpled on the floor beside the bed. Then I recognized Booth’s voice and swung my legs over and pulled them on. I got to the door just as he started knocking again. He stood there with his fist raised, combed and scrubbed and bright-eyed with a clean work shirt tucked into the same trousers he’d had on the night before. His eyes were clear behind his glasses and his face shone from the razor.

  “You look like you just washed up on the beach,” he said. “You need to cut down on your drinking.”

  I caught a whiff of eye-opener on his breath.

  “You’re not going to turn out to be one of those pain-in-the-ass morning people, are you?”

  “Only on vacation, son. I’m not a breakfast person either, but there’s a place in town that serves steak-and-eggs cooked in lard like it’s nineteen fifty-eight. How long will it take you to scrape off the top layer?”

  “Give me fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll give you ten. It’s a celebration. We outlasted Cabin Five. He was gone when I got up.”

  “He was gone when we went to bed. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe he was expecting somebody’s wife and she never came and he went home. Maybe what I thought was a gun was a box of chocolates.”

  “You know what they say. You never know what you’re going to get.”

  “The hell you don’t. They put a chart right in the box.”

  “Don’t trust it. I never worked from an outline even in the old days. Three minutes gone, friend. Try not to cut your nose off.” He strode back toward Four, whistling. It’s hard to whistle that consistently off-key. It is its own kind of perfect pitch.

  Seven minutes later, doused with cold spray and shaved and tucking in a fresh sport shirt, I climbed into the passenger’s side of his car, which he already had running. I’d decided at the last minute to leave the .38 in the cabin, hidden on the floor behind the radiator. If the Yankee was still around and his jacket had been hiding a gun, a shoot-out in broad daylight didn’t seem his style.