A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

by Loren D. Estleman

  Inside, the Plymouth smelled of stale tobacco and dust. A fine skin of Michigan road dust coated the dash and there was a cigarette burn in the vinyl above the ashtray, but apart from that the car was tidy and when he backed around and pulled into the road the engine ran smoothly and the gears meshed without hesitation. He drove with one hand on the crossbar and a Pall Mall burning between the fingers of his other hand resting on the window ledge. The odometer read too low for a car that old; it had rolled over a couple of hundred miles back. Either the car had a new motor and transmission or he took better care of it than he did of himself. He drove two to three miles over the limit and switched off the turn indicator after it had served its purpose.

  I said, “If you keep on like this you’re liable to give senior drivers a good name.”

  He blew through his nose. “If the world made sense, everyone would add ten miles an hour to his speed for every year past sixty.”

  “I figured you’d be sleeping in after last night.”

  “I don’t need near as much as I used to. That’s the part that makes sense.” He stuck the cigarette between his teeth and used both hands to wheel around a minivan waddling along at twenty. “Did I sing any of the old songs?”

  He asked the question in a casual tone without taking his eyes off the road. I answered just as casually.

  “Not a note. The years on beer don’t seem to have softened you up any.”

  The little silence that followed said he wasn’t satisfied. But he dropped the subject. “You wouldn’t know it now, but this place used to be the fishing capital of the Midwest. I saw Cesar Romero drinking with his buddies in a bar once. He had on a week’s beard and a dirty cap.”

  We were driving through the boarded-up downtown. A middle-ager in Spandex and a racing helmet was unlocking his bicycle from the lamppost in front of the local branch of a national bank chain and a woman carrying a plastic tub full of folded laundry stood on a corner waiting for the light to change. A pair of gulls skipped and flapped at each other over a wad of gum stuck on the sidewalk. I said, “I wouldn’t hold out for Cesar, but it’s still early in the season.”

  “Even then they’ll be out at the malls. But what the hell. In ten years everyone’ll be doing his shopping on the ’net and today’s kids will mope around pining for the days when they used to hang out in front of the Gap. Meanwhile there’s plenty of places to park downtown.” He turned the corner and glided into the curb two doors down from a yellow brickfront with CAPTAIN KIDD’S painted on the front window in skirling letters.

  The dim cool interior was done in a nautical motif, teakwood paneling and booths with spoked helms cut out of the partitions. Piped-in music tinkled out of a soporific piano. At Booth’s request, a teenage hostess in puffy sleeves and a tricorne hat led us between tables to a deck out back beneath a canvas awning. On the way we passed scattered couples, one or two lone diners, and a tableful of white-haired men in baseball caps and cocoa straw hats, the last group haw-hawing over platters of bacon and mounds of fluffy scrambled eggs.

  “Locals,” said Booth. “I swear it’s the same bunch that occupied the same spot twenty years ago, when this was Gus’s Tavern and there was a moosehead hanging over where the salad bar is now. You wonder what they still have to talk about. I wonder what happened to that moosehead.”

  “Maybe that’s what they talk about.”

  The land fell off sharply from the deck, giving us a view of the greater portion of the lake. It was Friday and several more fishermen were out, casting from the docks and wading offshore and rowing boats. An eight-footer with an outboard spluttered across, cutting a V in the silken surface. I hoped the ride was worth all the trouble the boater had gone through to get it started.

  I decided it was. It was good there with the sun on the water and the green smell of the needles and something rustling down among the reeds, a muskrat building its den or a hungry fox looking for the first catch of the morning. It was a connection, and it was strong enough to pull a lot of people, men mostly, out of their offices and tractor-trailer rigs and the back seats of limousines and all the way up here in pursuit of a thing they could get cheaper and better prepared in a good restaurant close to home. Either that, or they couldn’t stand the women they lived with.

  A different girl in the same outfit took our orders for steak-and-eggs and black coffee and went away. Booth offered me his pack and we both took one and I lit us up. The first drag made me cough. I hadn’t smoked unfiltered in years.

  He noticed. “CBS bought the detective I used in Bullets in fifty-nine. The series tanked after thirteen weeks, mostly because Winston was the sponsor and all the good guys had to smoke filters. You knew who the murderer was the minute he lit up a Camel.”

  I grinned. “That was just about the time you got out of publishing, wasn’t it?”

  “I got out of publishing the way Trotsky got out of Russia. I submitted a three-page outline for my next book to an editor I’d been working with for six years and he bounced it back without an explanation. I flew to New York to discuss it. He said Some of My Best Friends Are Killers hadn’t performed as well as expected—that’s how he put it, ‘didn’t perform as well as expected,’ like it was a juggler or a dancing chihuahua—and he thought I should take a year or so off and find my inspiration. I said if I took a year off all I’d find would be my own death from starvation. That’s when he said it.”

  Breakfast came. We sorted out blood-rare from medium-well and scrambled from over-easy—he liked his eggs to run from a harsh word—got our cups filled, and the waitress went off to see to the big group.

  Booth covered his eggs with pepper. “Where was I?”

  “ ‘That’s when he said it.’ ”

  “Yeah. He said all the great writers had to starve before they produced their best work. I hit him.”

  “With what?”

  “His desk, I wish. I laid him out with a straight right, the same one that got me fired as a sparring partner. Gashed two knuckles on his teeth and had to get a tetanus shot. It was beautiful. Cops arrested me at my hotel, I did a weekend in the Tombs. Publisher dropped the charges, which was the dirtiest thing anybody ever did to me in that town. I’d have held out for a jury of writers and told them on the stand what that son of a bitch said to me in his office. After that the verdict wouldn’t matter. That would have been the note to end a career on.”

  “I heard you missed deadlines and reneged on contracts.”

  “Everyone misses deadlines. I never backed out of a deal in my life. Who told you that—Mrs. Starr?” He didn’t wait for the answer. “That’s New York. It’s the only civilized society in history that bought into the mythology it made up for itself. Well, there’s Hollywood, but I said civilized. No, they didn’t boot me for being unreliable. My books stopped making money. That’s the only unredeemable sin.”

  My steak was as thin as a placemat and nearly as tough. I sawed at it until my wrists got tired and then I ate my eggs. They’d been cooked in lard, just as he said. I’d forgotten what a lethal dose of cholesterol can do for flavor. “Why did your books stop selling?”

  “Why does anything? I started telling the truth. Did you read Some of My Best Friends Are Killers?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t. Nobody wants fiction to be real. The people who buy books and go to the movies want the hero to snatch the heroine off the conveyor belt just before the buzzsaw gets her. My editor made me rewrite it. He was right. For what I wanted to say I should’ve written straight journalism, but I’d had my fill of that when I did it to eat while I wrote my books at night. Even after the rewrite there was just enough truth in it to turn away readers in herds.”

  “What did you want to say? Sometimes the hero doesn’t get there before the buzzsaw?”

  He nodded, chewing. “And when he does, sometimes he just turns up the speed.”

  Just then the sun wrapped itself in a sheet of cloud and it was no longer good on the lake. The surface looked tarn
ished. There wasn’t a boat or a fisherman in sight. Thunder chuckled to the west, where the sky still looked clear. A sudden damp gust shook the awning. The waitstaff bustled out to strip the settings off the outside tables.

  “These spring bumpers come in quick, but they blow through just as fast.” Booth sipped from his cup and resumed sawing at his steak. “Huron swallows them before they turn into anything. Otherwise they’d plane everything flat clear to the Atlantic.”

  “Should we go in?”

  “What for? Got something against getting wet? We’re born wet.” He grinned around a mouthful of eggs.

  So it was going to be a contest. I sat back with my hair lifting in the stiffening wind. “People these days like more grits with their sugar. The kind of fiction you want to write might go over now.”

  “I thought about that.”

  “Is that why you’re rewriting Paradise Valley?”

  He picked up a slice of toast and buttered it. It had been about to blow off his plate. “Don’t put too much store in what’s on those tapes. I’ve got arthritis in my fingers and I thought I’d get more done if I tried dictating. I filled six hours and stopped.”

  “Didn’t work?”

  “It was too easy. They ought to outlaw anything that makes the creative process convenient. That’s why so much shit gets written on computers.”

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  “I don’t have to answer the question. I don’t have to sit here with you except I didn’t feel like eating alone this morning. Just why escapes me now.”

  We ate for a while without speaking. A flat wave slid across the surface of the lake like a crumb-scraper.

  “You were a cop?” He used the toast to mop the egg yolk off his plate.

  “I took the oath. I never wore the uniform.”

  “Detroit?” I nodded. He swallowed. “My brother was a Detroit cop. Left to join the marines in forty-three. Jap sub torpedoed his troop ship one day out of Pearl. He never made it to the fighting.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t you sent that fish.”

  I finished my coffee. “How late in forty-three?”

  “September.”

  “Was he in Detroit in June?”

  He watched me over his cup. “He was on duty during the riot. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

  “He tell you anything?”

  “I was his little brother. He told me everything. Including the stuff his watch commander told him not to tell. That’s why he quit. It wasn’t what he saw, exactly. It was what he saw and couldn’t talk about. Except to me.”

  “What did he see?”

  “Did you read Paradise Valley?”

  “I read the one you published. I heard enough of your dictation to want to know more about the one you didn’t.”

  The rain came then. It started as a swishing in the pines to the west and swept our way in a straight line as if it were slung from a bucket. It smacked the awning and ran down it and over the edge, splattering the deck and completely blocking our view of the lake. We went inside just as lightning flared and a long cackle of thunder let go overhead. The old men at the big table were still drinking coffee and laughing at the same stories. A number of the other diners who had finished stood inside the entrance looking out at the hard rain and waiting for it to let up. The lights went down twice but stayed on.

  “We’re in for some dark,” Booth said. “Last time I was here we were out for three days. No, I invited you.” Standing in front of the cash register he waved away my wallet and paid the bill. The hostess rang it up, hunching her shoulders at each snap of thunder.

  I thought we were going to wait along with the others, but once he’d gotten his change and left a tip he turned up his collar, clutched it at his throat, put a hand on the doorknob, and leered at me. “Ready?”

  I grabbed my collar and jerked my chin down in a John Wayne nod. We dashed out into the cold wash. It smelled of brimstone from the warm concrete.

  We sprinted hard, but by the time we threw ourselves into the Plymouth’s deep front seat, hooting like drunken kids, we were soaked to the bone. The wipers couldn’t keep up with the downpour; they just smeared it over the windshield like glue. Waiting for it to slow down, Booth turned on the heater and let it warm up and then hit the blower to give us the illusion we were drying out. He was shivering, but when he caught me watching him he showed his teeth at me and winked. His was the generation that met everything, from a death in the family to a mortar blast at close range, with one eye closed.

  When the curtain finally opened he tugged on the lights and swept the car into a tight U-turn in the middle of Main Street, heading back to the motel. He pressed down the accelerator as we straightened out and the car fishtailed. He let the wheel twirl through his fingers right, then left, then right again as he corrected. I couldn’t tell if he was a good driver because he was good or because he thought he was. It’s the kind of thing that can only be proven when you crash.

  “Same drill,” he said as the neon fish leapt into view up ahead. “You fetch the ice, I’ll uncork the booze. Did you remember to turn off your radiator this morning?”

  “I think I forgot.”

  “I didn’t. First time I wished I had Alzheimer’s. We’ll meet in your cabin. I’m an old man. I talk better when I thaw out.”

  14

  For a long time I tried to be like my brother,” Booth said. “He was ten years older, a champion sprinter at Central High. He had two letters of commendation in his police jacket and was up for a medal of valor after the riot. He turned it down. That’s when I knew I had no hope.”

  It was dark in my cabin. The power was out and although it was just past 9:00 A.M. the window was black. When lightning streaked, the sky went platinum and I saw him sitting in the armchair with the hand holding his glass resting on the right arm. We had on dry clothes and the room was warm, but there was a damp smell that made me think of the tropics, where Duane Booth’s ship had gone down in September 1943.

  I was sitting up in bed with pillows bunched in the small of my back. My glass was on the nightstand and we each had a bottle so neither of us would have to get up to refill. I was closer to keeping up with him now that there was something in my stomach and Cabin Five was empty. Booth had brought the entire case; I’d asked if he was moving in and he’d said he wasn’t sure about the roof in Four and wanted to keep his valuables handy throughout the crisis. I’d almost asked about the manuscript, but he was talking now at last and I didn’t want to take a chance and grind down the starter.

  “The riot was the war’s worst blunder, and we had enough of those to lose the whole show if the enemy hadn’t had even more,” he said. “Ford and GM and Chrysler did what the government told them, put blacks next to whites from Kentucky and Tennessee and Mississippi and Georgia on the line for the first time and beefed up the security so there’d be no trouble in the defense plants; then when the whistle blew they threw open the doors and told them to go out and have fun. Half the police force was overseas, and what was left was too busy looking for Fifth-Column saboteurs to see how everyone else was getting along.

  “It all busted loose on June twentieth, a Sunday. A gang of rednecks threw a Negro woman off the Belle Isle bridge, or maybe it was a gang of Negroes and a white woman; I don’t think they ever did sort that one out. Anyway, rumors spread fast in the heat. Streetcars got dumped over, black dives in Paradise Valley were set on fire, people on the street, black and white, were beaten and gang-raped and shot. By Monday night there were more than thirty dead, most of them Negroes. Took five thousand federal troops to put it down. About six weeks later a governor’s committee reported it was the blacks that started it. I think that’s when the term whitewash was coined.” He took a long draught. “Shit. Tastes like water. Let’s see. Duane was on duty the whole time, partnering Officer Roland Clifford. You’ve heard of him.”

  “He’s the one hero both the white and black comm
unities agree on. There’s talk of naming a street after him.”

  “Hitler had a street too. I saved the clipping from the News, because Duane was mentioned. I threw it out finally, but I still know parts of it by heart: ‘Officer Roland R. Clifford of the Fifth Precinct was commended by the department for his heroic attempt to save three Negro defense workers from an agitated mob. With the aid of Officer Duane A. Booth, his partner, he stopped the Woodward Avenue streetcar at eight P.M. and removed the men, who were the only Negroes aboard, to give them safe conduct to their homes. On their way to the squad car, the two officers and their charges were intercepted by a mob of between twenty and thirty white males, who claimed that the three Negroes were responsible for an earlier atrocity and demanded that the accused parties be turned over to them for justice.’

  “To hell with the journalese,” Booth said. “I said before I had my fill of it. Clifford drew his gun and held back the mob while Duane hustled the three men into the car. Before he could get the door shut, a rock flew out of the crowd and hit Clifford in the head. He went down and the mob poured in and beat the shit out of Duane. When he and Clifford came to they were alone. They found the three poor bastards they’d been trying to protect hanging from three lampposts in the next block.”

  I drank whiskey and watched lightning bleach the inside of the cabin briefly. It made him look like a carved hunk of white marble.

  “That’s how you wrote it in the book,” I said when he didn’t continue. “You described it just as if you’d seen it yourself.”

  “No one saw it. That’s why it’s called fiction. I’m a better writer than anyone knows, me included. The way I wrote it, no one could believe it happened any other way. A year or so before Clifford died, the president came to Detroit and gave him a medal. He should’ve given me one, too. They won’t admit it now, and they sure wouldn’t have back when I wrote it, but that two-bit paperback made Roland Clifford. He’d have been forgotten along with all the other heroes who had the bad taste not to die when their names were in the headlines if Paradise Valley hadn’t sold six hundred thousand copies, mostly to horny little boys who got themselves off on the rape scenes. Is it my fault one of them grew up to be president?”