“Classical’s to get me through traffic jams without chewing off my lipstick,” she said. “Hard rock’s to blow off steam on the drive home. Soft rock gets me ready for a date, and I like to yell at the idiots on the talk station.”
“What about country?”
“I like country.”
“No jazz?”
“I don’t like jazz. I don’t like monster truck rallies either. Don’t tell the other cops.” She slowed down as we passed a traffic stop. The trooper seemed to have the situation in hand and she sped up again. “Why all the mystery? I don’t even know if I’m supposed to be Tweedledee or Tweedledum.”
“It may not be that kind of interrogation. This will be a more pleasant drive if you don’t ask too many questions.”
“The drive back will be a lot less pleasant if this turns out to be a wild goose chase.” But she didn’t ask any more questions. After a little while she switched the radio back on and punched up Mahler.
The weepy rain kept up until we passed Jackson. Beyond that point it was a full spring day, with fat crocuses blooming in the grass on the median and a Crayola sun beaming all alone on a construction-paper sky.
We hit Marshall just as the early-bird special was starting at the German restaurant. The parking lot was’filled with Jurassic Park-size sedans and we braked for a covey of white-haired pedestrians in Ban-Lon shirts and brocaded mother-of-the-bride jackets crossing the street against the light.
“You wonder how they got to be that age,” muttered the lieutenant.
“Wait till we get to Edencrest.”
The retirement home sat in a patch of obese sunlight with the same employee vehicles and a scatter of visitors’ cars parked in front. No ambulance today. Mrs. Milbocker stood up from her desk in the office and shook Thaler’s hand. “When Mr. Walker said he was bringing a police detective with him, I expected someone more along the lines of Dennis Franz.” The smile on the leathery face was brighter than the one she’d given me the first time; but she hadn’t been trying as hard then.
The lieutenant looked at me. “When did you call?”
“Just before I called you.”
The smile flickered. “Did I say something I shouldn’t have?”
Now Thaler smiled. “No, it’s all right when it’s official. A girl doesn’t like to be taken for granted.”
“How is she?” I asked Mrs. Milbocker.
“There’s been no change since we spoke. Physically she’s fine. She’s in remarkably good health considering she’s sixty pounds overweight. Mentally, not so good. She went into a bad spell after your visit last week. She had her good days and her bad days before, but she may have seen the last of her good days. Then again she could snap right out of it and remain lucid for weeks. We know so little about Alzheimer’s as opposed to Princess Di’s wardrobe.” She frowned for the first time since we’d met; but she couldn’t sustain it. “Let’s go see if she’s up to receiving visitors. Friday night she threw a pitcher of water at a nurse’s aide. Luckily it was plastic. She has quite an arm.”
The old man in the heavy sweater was asleep in his wheelchair when we passed him in the hall. He might not have moved since last week. Mrs. Milbocker checked his vitals on the fly. Thaler noted it.
“Mr. Goldstein was the first American on Corregidor,” I said.
She said nothing. Her face was green around the edges. In the Wayne County Morgue I’d seen her probe the skin of a corpse that had been bobbing in Lake St. Clair for three days, to test its consistency. I asked her how she was holding up.
“I was just thinking I haven’t visited my grandfather in months. He pitched a no-hitter for the Toledo Mud-hens in forty-eight. Now they’ve got him singing the Alphabet Song in Stockbridge.”
We stopped before the purple door. Mrs. Milbocker knocked, said, “Mrs. Skirrett?” When there was no answer the second time she opened the door and went in.
The small bedroom looked as cheerful as it had before. The curtains were pulled aside from the window, letting sunlight fall onto Lowell Birdsall Senior’s original oil painting for the cover of Paradise Valley and the massive bulk that was Fleta Skirrett, squeezed into a wheelchair beside the bed. The pink-and-white crocheted coverlet had been removed from the bed and draped across her lap, above which showed a yellow cotton blouse with birds printed on it. Her plump pink face was a cardboardy color beneath the cotton-candy pink of her hair, with her blue eyes roaming around a pair of sunken hollows as if someone had pushed them in with his fingers. The fat of her great bare arms lay in folds on top of the coverlet. Her wrists were tied to the arms of the chair with strips of white cloth.
“We make it a point to dress them every day and sit them up,” Mrs. Milbocker said. “The ties shock some visitors, but without them they can slide right out the bottom and break a bone. How are you, dear?”
It was the first time I’d heard her address the woman in the high affected voice of a parent talking to a small child.
“Rita?” The cartoony voice had a crack in it, like a worn-out Betty Boop soundtrack.
“No, dear, it’s Mrs. Milbocker.” She looked at us. “Sometimes she thinks I’m her sister.”
I grinned. “Rita and Fleta? Are they twins?”
“Not so you’d notice. She only comes to visit at Christmas. She’s as bony as a hatrack and acts as if a smile would violate her warranty. There’s a theory that says you shouldn’t agitate them by setting them straight. Even if I agreed with it I’m not about to let her go on thinking I’m Rita.”
“I hope you brought something to eat, sis. They never feed me.”
“You had lunch an hour ago. You’re supposed to be losing weight.”
“If I drop three more pounds I can get into those step-ins for the Hudson’s catalogue.”
Mrs. Milbocker said, “Now she’s back to being a model.”
“Tell me the truth, Rita. Do I look like Virginia Mayo? If I get the book-cover job I can say good-bye to lingerie ads.”
Thaler said, “This is useless.”
“Fleta, you got the job,” I said. “Birdsall says you’re perfect.”
It wasn’t going to work. The sunken eyes, of a shade so far removed from the glacial blue of Detective VaxhÖlm’s as to belong to a separate spectrum, continued to roam in their fleshy prison like inmates pacing their cells. Then they seemed to come forward a quarterinch and she sucked in first one lip, then the other, wetting them.
“Oh, I’m so glad. A book is so much more permanent than a catalogue. And Mr. Birdsall is such a fine artist, and handsome. He looks like Van Gogh ought to have. Except for the ear, of course.”
The worn-out quality was gone from the voice. She sounded even younger than she had when she was smoking a forbidden butt and talking about sleeping with Dali. Thaler and I exchanged glances.
Mrs. Milbocker wasn’t smiling. “You won’t upset her, will you?”
“Fleta,” Thaler said, “do you remember me? Sergeant Saunders. This is Officer O’Hara. We’re with the Detroit Police.”
“I remember.” Fleta’s smile was brilliant. “You said I look like Marilyn.”
“That’s right, only prettier. You don’t look made over.”
I turned to Mrs. Milbocker and lowered my tone. “You can stay and make sure she doesn’t get too worked up. Try not to say anything meanwhile.”
Thaler said, “I’ve had emergency training.”
Fleta said, “What?”
Mrs. Milbocker pressed her lips together for a moment. “I’ll come back and look in on you in a few minutes. Poke your head out into the hall and yell if she becomes hyper. And don’t untie her.”
“Nothing, Fleta,” Thaler said when we were alone. “We’re still investigating what happened to Allison Booth. You remember Gene Booth’s wife?”
“Of course. That poor woman. How horrible. You haven’t caught the man?”
“We’ve got a suspect. You know who he is.”
I shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit up.
“She knows, all right.” I spat smoke. “You know plenty, don’t you, sister? Everything except where your boyfriend Birdsall was the night she got poked full of holes, and you can guess that.”
“No. I know exactly where he was. He was in his studio, working late. I was posing for him. He had a deadline.”
“He had a deadline, all right,” I said.
Thaler said, “Shut up, O’Hara. It’s all right if you got your nights mixed up, Fleta. That happens. We won’t hold it against you if you remember it differently from the way you told us the first time.”
The fat cheeks jiggled when she shook her head. “I didn’t lie. He isn’t my boyfriend. We were together, working.”
“It isn’t just the salesgirl anymore,” Thaler said. “We’ve got a corroborating witness who saw Birdsall driving with Allison that night. This one got the license number. It was his car.”
“It’s a mistake.” She tried to raise her hands and encountered resistance. She looked down at her wrists and her face twisted. She looked like the blonde waving the broken bottle in the Paradise Valley picture. “Why am I tied up? I don’t do bondage. Who am I, Betty Page?”
I ground the filter between my teeth. “You’ll be tied up a lot tighter if you don’t start telling some truth. Let’s tank her,” I told Thaler.
“O’Hara’s right, Fleta. Right now we can help you, put in a good word. Nobody can blame you for trying to help out a friend. If we give this to the lieutenant it’s out of our hands. He’s got the press on his neck. You could do five years as an accessory.”
“Untie me!” Her voice rose. “Untie me or I won’t say another word!”
I looked at Thaler. She bent over the chair and tugged loose the cloth strips. Fleta rubbed her wrists. Her lower lip stuck out. “Look at those marks. I won’t be able to work for days. I cut my mouth licking an envelope last month and Lowell sent me home for a week, without even an advance to hold me over. He said it was distracting.”
“Lowell, is it?” I laughed nastily. Thaler scowled at me and made a lowering motion with one hand.
“They aren’t bad,” she said.
“Modeling is hard work.” Fleta rubbed with one broad thumb at a nearly invisible pressure-mark at the base of her left hand. “Everyone thinks you’re getting paid all this money to do nothing. If I eat any more than a cracker for lunch I blow up like a balloon. I have to buy all my own makeup, and let me tell you, you can go through a whole lipstick in one session. I’m lucky when I don’t have to buy my own clothes to model in, and when I do they’re almost never any good for anything but modeling. I can’t go out on the street dressed like Diana, Goddess of the Hunt. And the cramping’s awful. Some mornings I feel like I went fifteen rounds with Primo Carnera.”
“Cut it,” I said. “You’ll have me bawling in a minute. Tell me something, Fleta; when you strip for Lowell, does he paint you before or after?”
The coverlet slid off her lap. One massive arm swept up in a pink flash and the side of my head exploded. It was the side with the bad eye. I was blinded for half a second. I groped and caught one of her wrists, but she slapped me again just as hard with the free hand and twisted out of my grasp. Her voice was shrill and she knew every name that couldn’t be printed in the book. Thaler moved in to get a hammerlock on her, but nothing that big had ever moved that fast and Fleta ducked under her arm, scrabbling among the litter of items on the nightstand beside the bed. She got hold of something and hurled herself at Thaler, pinning her to the wall with her huge bosom and belly and swinging her right arm up and down, up and down, stabbing and slashing.
“Tramp!” she screamed. “Nymphomaniac! How many men you need? Bitch! How stupid did you think I was? You think I wouldn’t follow him? Whore!”
Up and down, up and down and up while Thaler got one foot to the side and twisted a shoulder into the wall for leverage and pushed out, shoving against that flesh avalanche with all the strength in her wiry body while the object clenched in the pudgy dimpled fist raked up and down, striking her on the head and neck and behind her back and into her breasts. I lunged and got one arm across the mad old woman’s throat from behind and hauled back with every crack in my ribcage spreading and catching fire. I hauled back and back and hit the bed with my calves and fell over, holding on and dragging her great weight down on top of me while she clawed at my arm with the nails of her free hand and flailed out with the weapon in the other, shrieking names at the top of her lungs. I couldn’t breathe, but I tightened my grip, flexing my biceps until I could feel the veins standing out on them like ropes. She stopped shrieking and started gurgling, fighting now for breath as I increased the pressure. Very slowly her strength began to fail. She stopped clawing and the other hand drifted down.
“Enough!” It was Lieutenant Thaler. “She’s through. Let up.”
I let up. The old woman lay atop me like a sack of bowling balls, wheezing but no longer struggling. I stretched my neck to see past the mound of her shoulder. There were other people in the room now, white heads mostly, with Mrs. Milbocker’s bushy red perm bobbing among them as she forced her way through. Thaler was standing in front of them. The tail of her blouse was pulled out on one side and she’d lost her hairband, but there was no blood. She groped at Fleta Skirrett’s slack fingers and held up a blunt hairbrush made of molded white plastic with a tangle of pink hairs caught in the bristles.
30
The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to truth. Slowly, she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in….
“How c-could you?” she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
“It was easy,” I said.
—Mickey Spillane
I, The Jury (1948)
It was another pretty day and most of the people who had gathered in the red-brick structure modeled after the capitol building in Philadelphia were buying tickets for Greenfield Village across the street; but Louise Stan-had said Henry Ford Museum and so I opted for the indoor attraction. I found her just inside the museum entrance, putting on lipstick with the aid of her reflection in the shimmering finish of a black-and-nickel 1949 Mercury in the automobile exhibit. She had on a beige jacket with the sleeves rolled halfway up her forearms and a matching skirt of some material that looked like burlap but was probably unbleached silk. A tricky arrangement involving amber-and-mica combs caught some of her hair above her ears and allowed the rest to fall down her back in a pale spill. She smiled when she saw me and dropped her lipstick into the woven-leather bag she’d been carrying the day we met in the Caucus Club.
“I like the way they display the cars in their natural habitat,” she said. “FaÇades of old-fashioned drive-ins and like that. Clever.”
“The new curator’s idea. They used to have them in plain rows like a time-release parking lot. What have you seen so far?”
“I don’t know where to start. Let’s see, I’ve seen the chair Lincoln was sitting in at Ford’s Theater—I thought you were kidding about that—and some kind of aluminum tube said to contain Thomas Edison’s last breath. Is that genuine?”
“That one was Henry Ford’s idea. He sent his son Edsel to get it. He was as nuts as he was brilliant.”
“I even saw The Spirit of St. Louis. I thought it was in the Smithsonian.”
“Jimmy Stewart flew this one in the movie. Washington had even deeper pockets than Henry. Wait till you see the Village. Edison’s laboratory is within walking distance of the Wright brothers’ shop.”
“I wish I had the time. My luggage is outside. I leave here straight for home in an hour. But I’ve been meaning to see this place every visit, and I don’t know when I’ll be back. I hope you don’t mind. Debra’s back from Indiana. We can’t talk at the house without having to answer a lot of pesky questions.”
“I don’t mind. It’s been years since my last visit. If I
have to wait till you misplace another Detroit writer I may never make it.”
“The other night was wonderful. I hope you don’t think Booth’s book was all I cared about.”
“Save it until you’ve read it.” I held out the briefcase I’d carried in. It was brand new from Kmart, vinyl over cardboard with the leathergrain printed on.
She hesitated. “What is it? Not the manuscript.”
“Black Lake still has that. These are Booth’s dictation tapes. The manuscript’s probably a long way from complete. When you get it your ghost might need the tapes to finish it.”
She took the case. “I may just make an editor out of you yet.”
“Too risky. I might hop on the wrong subway train and finish up in Brooklyn.”
“Thank you, Amos. I’m sorry it went so hard for you. I still think you should swear out a complaint against Cypress. Possession of a handgun alone would land him in prison.”
“He’d just bargain his way into another immunity. Guys like Glad Eddie only show enough of their cards to win the current hand. Anyway he didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Booth.”
“Poor Gene. Poor Fleta, too. I shouldn’t feel sorry for her, but I do.” I’d given Louise a complete report over the telephone.
“Me, too,” I said. “I liked her even when we were wrestling.”
“Thank God it was just a hairbrush. Is Lieutenant Thaler all right?”
“Just bruised. She can still write her memoirs.”
“You know that’s not the reason I asked. I like her. Anything there?” She turned her violet gaze on me.
“I make it a point never to date anyone who knows more submission holds than I do.” A rib pinched me at the thought.
She saw the face I made. “I hope you saw a doctor.”
“Sports physician in Dearborn. I cleared him of a narcotics charge a couple of years ago. He taped me up for the cost of the roll. It’ll be on the expense sheet.”
A Smile on the Face of the Tiger Page 22