A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Are you sure it was from him? You said yourself pianos fall on you from time to time.”

  “I found a pair of smashed glasses where I fell. I don’t need the prescription to know they were the ones Hurley was wearing at Borders. Everything happened too fast for me to count, but our chef friend said he saw two men laying rubber in a gray Lincoln. He’d have Herb with him on a job like that. It wasn’t your usual publicist work. Do you read Italian?”

  She blinked. “My ex-husband and I spent a winter in Rome. I understand it better than I speak it. What a question. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “There’s a copy of Cypress’ book in my car. I might have been able to remember the inscription he wrote if I hadn’t been hit on the head, but I doubt it. Can you take a look at it and translate?”

  She got up and went out. While I was waiting for her to come back I finished my coffee. It was nearly as cold as the ice pack but I needed the caffeine. It’s important to stay awake for a few hours after sustaining a concussion. She returned with the book open in her hands and a tight-lipped smile. “It’s too bad you’re not multilingual,” she said. “You might have spared yourself a beating. Do you mind a loose interpretation?”

  “Punt.”

  “The man has a sense of humor. He wrote ‘I feel your pain.’”

  Grinning hurt; but I’m a tough guy. “If he didn’t have any imagination he wouldn’t have written a book.”

  “It was probably ghosted.” She stopped smiling. “Amos, you should call the police.”

  “They’re the competition. In any case it doesn’t prove anything, except that he’s not worried enough to cover his tracks. Which makes me think I’m not as right as I thought I was.”

  “He’s pretty sure of his protection.”

  “Either that or he doesn’t think he needs any. Maybe he doesn’t know Booth’s dead.”

  She was still standing, holding the book open. She closed it gently. “But if it was suicide, what was Cypress doing staying in the next cabin?”

  “I’ll ask him.”

  “You’re going to confront him again after what happened the last time?”

  “He owes me lunch.”

  “Not on my time,” she said. “One man has died already. If Booth was murdered, I want to know why and if it had anything to do with the book he was writing. I need to know if in some way I’m responsible. If he killed himself, well, that’s that, and if it has anything to do with me—I don’t know, maybe I gave him hope just when he’d resigned himself to life as a has-been and when he found out he was right all along it put him over the edge—I’ll live with that. What I can’t live with is two men dead before their time over a book with a shelf life of three months maximum. I’ll take you off the case before I let that happen.”

  “So am I fired?”

  She pressed her lips tight. Standing there in her robe with her hair loose, holding a book, she looked like an Annunciation painting. “What if you are? Will you forget Glad Eddie and go back to whatever it is you do that doesn’t involve getting roughed around in restaurant parking lots?”

  “Don’t let that enter into your figuring. As parking lots go I’ve kissed the asphalt in places a lot less classy than the Blue Heron. I don’t usually have to make a reservation. I wouldn’t have gotten roughed around at all if I’d remembered I was meeting a hoodlum instead of a literary celebrity. I won’t make that mistake twice.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. If I fire you, will it take?”

  “I don’t know. Fire me and let’s see.”

  A heavy truck detouring around construction on I-75 shuddered past on the street, its load shifting over a break in the pavement. The noise made her flinch. She tossed the book into the rocker and sank down onto the slipcovered sofa. One half of her robe slid sideways, showing the whole of one bare leg. She’d been walking around Central Park Sundays.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I don’t know what’s right: abandon Eugene Booth and risk another life or cut our losses and risk letting a murderer go free. It isn’t like deciding which book to publish.”

  “I’ll make it easy, since it’s my life. If Booth killed himself, someone walked around his body hanging in his cabin and walked out with his manuscript. It makes more sense that whoever did that also strung him up to begin with. It takes strength to hoist a full-grown man, dead or dead drunk, and hold him up long enough to slip a noose over his head. Eddie’s a healthy-looking fifty. If he needed help he has Hurley and Herb, which sounds like a magic act in Vegas. Then there’s the very good point that I don’t like getting my head and my ribs kicked in next to a Dumpster when I ought to be inside choosing between the rack of lamb and the pan-roasted veal. When I’m through bouncing Siegfried and Roy off a few walls and the cops show up to nail me for battery, it might help my case if I can claim a client, but whether I’m on the clock or not I’m going to pay them a visit. Did I mention I don’t like getting my head and my ribs kicked in?”

  “A couple of times.” She smiled. “Do you make enough from this hobby of yours to pay taxes?”

  “The government seems to think so. Some days I’m not so sure. It pays better than bungee-jumping, and the risk’s not as high. Cords break.”

  “So do skulls.”

  I had nothing to throw at that. I turned the ice pack over and pressed it against my eye. It was just as warm on that side. “Is there another one of these in the freezer? I sucked the life out of this one.”

  “It was the only one. I can put some ice in a plastic bag.”

  “Don’t bother. I’m beginning to feel like broccoli.”

  “Would you like to lie down?”

  “I thought I was.”

  “I meant over here.”

  I flipped the ice pack onto the table beside the chair. It was supporting a lamp with a hunting scene in the base. She had lowered herself to one elbow and crossed her legs, hanging a mule off one slim foot. She had a high arch.

  I said, “I take it I’m still employed.”

  She wasn’t insulted. She never was when it came to that. “Tell me something?” she said. “When that nice young man picked you up off the pavement, why did you tell him to take you here?”

  “It was closest. Hospitals make you watch soap operas all day and charge five bucks a pop for aspirin.”

  “Your house is just as close.”

  “You’ve been boning up on the local geography.”

  “I rented a car yesterday. The man at Hertz gave me a map. Detroit certainly has a lot of suburbs.”

  “White flight. All I had to do at home was sleep, and that’s not a good idea when you’ve taken a hit to the head. Conversation with you has never put me to sleep yet.”

  “Don’t you have friends?”

  “I also had a report to make. Combining things saves my clients money.”

  “I don’t believe you. When a dog gets shot he limps out of his way to the place where he can find love and sympathy.”

  “Poetic, but not zoologically correct,” I said. “He crawls under a porch.”

  “What are you, a dog or a man?”

  I said nothing. She took a base.

  “We have a history, you know,” she said.

  “So do France and Germany. That doesn’t make us Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Romeo and Juliet were teenagers. We’re grownups.”

  She had me beat in literature.

  “New York’s a village,” she said. “Publishers’ Row is even smaller. It’s like incest. I’ve been busy for two years trying to find a hole to get my head above water. I haven’t seen a show since Sunset Boulevard closed, or been to a good restaurant where I didn’t put the check on my corporate card since I can’t remember when. It’s been a long dry spell, Amos. I’m not a camel.”

  I glanced toward the front door. She saw it.

  “Debra called this morning. She’s stuck in Terre Haute. If anybody walks in on us, you have my permission to shoot them down.”
r />   “I left my gun in the car.”

  She tugged loose her sash with an impatient jerk. The robe fell open the rest of the way. There were no swimsuit rules in the tanning beds in Manhattan.

  I got up out of the chair without a grunt or a gasp and managed not to sway while the blood charged out of my head and made the long circulatory journey back. She made room for me on the cushions and I went over and sat on one hip on the edge. A rib pinched. I caught my lip. “You might have to do most of the work.”

  “I’m the boss. I’m used to it.” She put her arms around me and drew me down beside her.

  23

  I ghosted away from there an hour past dark. We’d moved to the guest room, the only room in the house that didn’t look as if Heidi might wander in at any moment, and I left Louise sleeping. I found a pad and pen in the kitchen, but all I could think of to write was “Senso vostra angoscia.” That didn’t seem appropriate. I didn’t leave a note.

  The night air was cool and damp and smelled of fresh-cut grass. The driver’s seat felt clammy when I eased under the wheel. I wouldn’t be taking any deep breaths for a couple of weeks, but my head was clear and the business with the ice pack had opened up my left eye enough for driving. Back home I mixed a drink from the everyday bottle, got the rest of the fried-egg sandwiches I’d made that morning out of the refrigerator, and sat in the breakfast nook to wash them down with Scotch and tap water. Fourteen hours old and cold, they tasted like cork coasters. It was a far cry from the lunch I hadn’t had at the Blue Heron, but it was better than what fifteen others had had after they met up with Eddie Cypress.

  I’d brought his book home. There was a full-length photograph of Glad Eddie on the front of the jacket, in his working uniform of blue Oxford shirt, loose-fitting sportcoat, pleated slacks, and Gucci loafers, which were the only things Italian about him apart from some phrases he’d picked up on the job, unless some Roman centurion had docked at his great-plus-grandmother’s Greek island for an olive to put in his martini and fell in love between tides. The family name, according to the copy on an inside flap, was Kyparissia, but an evergreen tree was as close as the civil servant who had checked his grandfather through Ellis Island could come.

  The book’s title was Prey Tell.

  I laid it facedown on the table. I didn’t feel like reading. Reading seemed to be all I’d been doing on this one when I wasn’t driving or getting my face punched. The left side of it from the eye down ached and felt tight. I knew what it was like to be the Phantom of the Opera, except my tenor sounded like a teakettle with a sore throat.

  A white rectangle on the table caught my eye. Russell Fearing’s business card had fallen out of the book when I opened it. The calm black bodyguard with the Secret Service resumÉ had told me I’d need him someday if they didn’t kill me first.

  I knew the office would be closed, but I went into the living room and called the number anyway. A female contralto with a crumpet in it confirmed in a recording that I’d reached the headquarters of Russell Fearing Security Services and told me the hours of operation were 9:00 A.M. to 6:30 P.M. Monday through Friday. She offered me the opportunity to record a message. I didn’t take it.

  It was still early, but I had put in a full day for a sabbath, with the most exhausting part at the end. Louise Starr was a cool cypher only when it came to the publishing business. My face ached, my ribs hurt. My blood had ceased to circulate in my extremities, bagging like lead shot in my feet and hands. I shuffled when I walked and had to rest my arms before unfastening the next button. I dumped myself into bed, not bothering with the sheet or blanket, and woke up ten hours later in the same position, on my stomach with my head twisted to the right. I drove to the office making all right turns because I couldn’t turn my head left.

  No one was waiting to throw money at me in the reception room and the mail hadn’t come yet, but the cops were at work. My answering service told me Mary Ann Thaler had called. I couldn’t get her on the extension so I called the switchboard, worked my way down the menu and up through a sergeant at the desk and a detective third grade to a detective sergeant named Richman who said Lieutenant Thaler was away from her desk. I left my name and rang off. The whole thing had taken just twice as long as it had before they’d updated the system.

  The telephone rang as soon as I took my hand off the receiver. It was Thaler.

  “You sound like Monday morning,” she said. “Big weekend?”

  “Bigger than both of us. How was yours?”

  “It was a weekend. They come around every sixth day, no surprise. Life’s short enough without blowing it away in five-day increments waiting for Saturday.”

  “Did your laundry, right? Run out of quarters?”

  “I send out my laundry. I don’t cook either if I can help it. I’m not the girl of your dreams, Walker. I’m also not the policeman of your dreams. I heard back from my friend in the Big Apple. Those plates you saw at Black Lake don’t belong to a GMC pickup. They’re registered to a five-year-old Ford Escort, and they were reported stolen in Manhattan a week ago.”

  “I’d have been disappointed in him if they weren’t. The pickup was probably hot too.”

  “Undoubtedly.” There was a short silence. “Got pretty chummy with him on two minutes’ acquaintance, did you?”

  I’d speared a Winston between my lips. I struck the match at a bad angle and burned my fingers. I got rid of it and blew on them. My brain was still soft on one side. The man in Cabin Five was still Robert C. Brown to her, a guy in sunglasses and a Yankees cap. If this kept up I was going to have to hire someone to edit an A. Walker Investigations newsletter to help me keep my half-truths straight.

  “I’m talking about a basic human type,” I said. “They learned to hunt by pack rules.”

  Someone trundled a metal file drawer shut on her end. It was a warm morning; the door to her office would be open to circulate air. “Where were you yesterday, Walker? I tried your home phone all day. One of my nines looked like a seven and I wanted to make sure I got the plate number right. I had to read it out both ways. It hadn’t been assigned with a seven in that spot so we were all right, but it was a headache I didn’t need.”

  “I went to a movie.” I told her which one. I stopped before I told her what theater. People who are establishing alibis are full of such helpful information.

  “All night too? I tried you at nine-thirty and eleven, let it ring ten times.”

  “I was asleep, working on a stiff neck.”

  “The movie must have taken a lot out of you. Was there a cartoon?”

  “If you were lonely you should have called your inspector friend. I don’t wear this office home.”

  “Since when?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “So you got laid. Congratulations. The blonde lady editor with the stick up her skirt, no doubt. You could have said something up front without naming names. Why do you figure you have to lock everything up? You live your life like a suspicious person.”

  “I’ve been reading too many paperback mysteries.” I cracked another match. This time I got the tobacco going without personal injury.

  “I’ll tell you how I spent my Sunday,” she said. “When I wasn’t trying to get you on the line, I was thinking about Allison Booth.”

  “What did you think up?”

  “Nothing worth bringing to court. I never owned a pair of black lace panties until I was twenty-five. Would you care to know why?”

  “If you care, I care.” She wasn’t the kind who locked things up.

  “It was something my mother told me. ‘Never wear black lace panties, because if you get in an accident the doctors will think you’re a tramp and they won’t work as hard to save your life.’ What’s that say to you?”

  “Right off the bat it says your mother never dated a doctor.”

  “My mother is an angel and it’s not your privilege to soil her good name. She taped my first police-range qualifying target on her refrigerator. What it says is nice girls finish fi
rst and bad girls are just finished. Or were, when my mother was a girl and Allison Booth got stabbed full of holes and two cops named Saunders and O’Hara went through the motions of looking for her killer and hung them up as soon as their first suspect went sour. All because the night someone stuffed her into a window well she met a man outside Hudson’s who was not her husband. I’m not reopening this case to get a promotion. I’m doing it for all the women who want to wear black lace panties even if nobody ever gets to see them.”

  “Are you wearing them right now?”

  “Go directly to hell. What’s on the list today?”

  “Lowell Birdsall was out of town yesterday. I want to ask him if he knew the cops liked his father for the Booth murder in the beginning. He might not have known, but I want to be looking at him when he tells me. If he says he knew I want to ask why it didn’t come up the first time we spoke.”

  “I’ll go with you. I’ll be Tweedledee.”

  “Why should you be Tweedledee? You’re badge-carrying fuzz.”

  “I’m also a girl. He’ll expect me to be the one who offers him a warm cup of tea and my pillowy bosom. You’re the ape who wants to tie him around a banister.”

  “You don’t have a pillowy bosom. And I thought you girls didn’t like to be called girls.”

  “Nobody asked my opinion when the subject came up. If they had I’d have convinced them it’s one weapon we should never trade away.”

  “You’re making sweeping assumptions about Birdsall’s experience of the opposite sex. Don’t forget, he grew up on a steady diet of hardboiled dames and vixens in black sable. Also he’s a big muscular baldy. That’s just the type that runs toward women who buy dog collars by the gross even though they live in apartments where pets aren’t allowed. If you confuse him he’ll clam up.”

  “Okay, I’ll be Tweedledum. Just don’t tell the inspector. He thinks I’m demure.”