A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (7 page)

“My folks were the same way during the riot in sixty-seven, and I was older than you.”

“We’re past due for a third. Anyway we met for lunch, and I guess it was pretty clear an old fat woman wasn’t going to be much use, but I couldn’t help telling him my setup. He said there was a vacancy at the park and he could get me a deal if I didn’t mind living in a mobile home. I said I wouldn’t squawk about a cardboard box if it didn’t come with my niece’s husband.”

“Was he propositioning you?”

“It wouldn’t have bothered me if he was. I’d have put out, too. It’s been a mighty long time, and Gene is a good-looking man. The itch doesn’t go away when you pass fifty. It just gets harder to scratch.”

She was growing younger; and I thought of the broad battered face in the photo on Eugene Booth’s driver’s license. But someone had to fall for the pugs or there wouldn’t be so many of them. “I take it from the use of the subjunctive case you and he weren’t an item.”

She showed off her well-fitting teeth. They might have been all hers at that. “Subjunctive. I know what that is. You’ve hung around a few writers yourself. No, he wasn’t trying to get into my pants, and he didn’t. It was just a friendly deal. All the people his age who lived at White Pine were miserable or dull or both. Usually both. A tin box in a row of them is okay for starting out but rotten for ending up. All he ever heard around there was complaints. That’s part of the job, but you sure don’t want to have to listen when you’re with the people you call your friends. If he’d tried to strike up anything social with any of them, he’d have gone as dotty as me.”

“I haven’t heard anything dotty so far.” I got rid of my Winston. It had taken me twice as long as she, and her second had burned down almost as far as the logo. That breathy voice was pure vaporized nicotine.

“What a sweet thing to say. My family says I’m nuts. I wouldn’t care about that, but Gene thought so too. He was the one who told me to come here. It seems I took a little walk one night and he was afraid I’d finish up under a bus. He said,
‘You
might not mind, Flea, but a clichÉ like that would be an insult to me.’ He calls me Flea. Guess ‘cause I’m bugs.”

I smiled. My teeth weren’t fitting as well as hers and I’d grown them myself. “What did you talk about when he came to visit? Was he writing?”

“I never heard him talk about writing even when we were young. I didn’t know many writers, but all the painters I knew either talked about their work all the time or anything else but. Gene belonged to the second group. At White Pine, he talked about his dead wife, the army, his brother, some of the jobs he’d had; I guess what most men his age talk about. He loved his wife, hated the army, got along okay with his brother. Oh, and he liked to fish, but he said he hadn’t been fishing in years. The rest of the time he sat and listened to me chatter on. Pretty dull, huh? I guess we weren’t so much different from the others after all.”

“His brother’s name was Duane, wasn’t it? I heard he’d died.”

“Gene never said and I didn’t ask. You don’t, you know, at our time of life. It’s tactless. He always spoke about Duane in the past tense, so I guess he did.”

It was all wearing thin. Either her personality or the surroundings were leeching all the freshness out of the morning. I thought about showing her Booth’s note on the Alamo letterhead, about a gelding knowing better than to try to breed. It stayed in my pocket. I had the thought it was something he wouldn’t want her to see. What that had to do with anything, I didn’t know to the tenth power.

“How is it you were friends when you modeled? You said you didn’t know many writers.”

“I didn’t. I met him through Lowell. Gene used to drop in to watch him paint. They admired each other’s work. When Gene’s books started selling and his publisher wanted to commission a better-known artist in New York, Gene said no. He refused to sign a contract until they agreed to have Lowell do all his covers.”

“Lowell?”

“Lowell Birdsall.” She waved twelve ounces of zir-conia in the direction of the painting on the wall. “They didn’t sign them in those days. Potboilers, Lowell said. Something to pay the bills while he was waiting for the Louvre to call.”

I couldn’t figure out why the name was familiar until I remembered the business card in my wallet. I peeled it out. “Lowell Birdsall,” it read. “Systems Analysis.” It listed five numbers and none of them was an address. I showed it to her. “I got this from a clerk in a bookstore. She said he’s a collector.”

She slid down her glasses to read over the tops, then shook her head and pushed them back up. “That’s his son. Lowell died years ago. Junior used to sneak in after school, hoping to catch me undressing for work. I still get Christmas cards from him. He’s living in his father’s old studio in the Alamo.”

7

O
n the way out I leaned into Mrs. Milbocker’s office to thank her again. She smiled up from her clipboard. Her leathery face broke up into deep lines.

“Character, isn’t she?” she said. “Sometimes I think if some of our livelier guests channeled the energy they spend being charmingly eccentric into just plain living, they wouldn’t need Edencrest. But it could be I’m being eccentric myself. It rubs off.”

“What did you do before this, traffic cop?”

“Just the opposite. I stole cars and stripped them and sold the parts for drug money. This started out as five hundred hours of community service and ran into six years and counting.”

“The system works.”

“The system works for those who would’ve found their way out without it. But if it weren’t for this job I’d probably be wearing a gold blazer and selling real estate. Gold doesn’t suit my complexion.”

“Are you hungry? How’s the food at the German place?”

“Yes, and not bad. Unfortunately I have to eat here. The guests become paranoid when they don’t see me sharing their creamed corn. I’d invite you, but they’d think you were sent here by the state to shut us down. They’ve been uneasy ever since we prosecuted an orderly last year for attempted molestation.”

“Just as well. I’m addicted to chewing.”

“Try the wurst platter.”

I left her to her clipboard and went out past a middle-aged couple heading inside with a picnic basket. The woman was reminding the man that this could be Dad’s last birthday.

“Bullshit. He’s had more last birthdays than the Kennedys.”

At the restaurant I got a table under the Hohenzollern coat-of-arms. I was going to order the wurst platter right up until the waitress asked me what I wanted. I lost courage and had pork chops instead, but I washed them down with beer from a bottle with a Valkyrie on the label.

All the way back to Detroit I was aware of the thing growing like a potato in the unlighted bin behind my brain stem. Something Fleta Skirrett had said had fed it, but I didn’t know what. That kind of thing was happening more and more lately. I’d considered taking a mail-order course in self-hypnosis, but I was afraid I’d forget how to snap myself out of it.

I did some business back at the office. The answering service said a lawyer had called to ask me to check out a client’s story. I called him for the particulars, wrapped the thing up in two conversations lasting three and five minutes respectively, typed up my report along with a bill, pounded a stamp on the envelope, and slid it into the
OUT
basket. There were no messages from Louise Starr, so Eugene Booth hadn’t resurfaced while I was in Marshall. By then the pork chops were making me sleepy, so I switched on the electric fan and stuck my face into it and when I was alert enough to ask questions and listen to the answers I dialed one of the numbers on Lowell Birdsall’s business card. I got a dreamy kind of a male voice that I had to separate from the Sinatra ballad playing in the background. He awoke from his dream when I mentioned Eugene Booth and told me he’d be out between four and five but expected to be home the rest of the evening—Room 610 at the Alamo Motel—and looked forward to showing me his collection. He sounded like an only child with his own room.

I had a couple of hours to kill, so I settled a heel into the hollow I’d worn in the drawleaf of the desk, crossed my ankles, and opened
Deadtime Story
to the spot I’d marked with a spent match.

Following a number of adventures on the road, some of them in the company of a beautiful female hitch-hiker who happened to put her thumb out at just the right time, the accountant on the run from the mob stopped at a rustic motel in the northwoods. There by the pulsing light of a cheap lamp running off a sputtering generator he wrote a note of explanation to the special prosecutor and wrapped it and the incriminating ledgers in butcher paper. The beautiful hitchhiker, who was staying in the next cabin, had to be persuaded to agree to deliver the package, knowing that they might never see each other again. She didn’t get ten miles before she fell into the hands of the Mafia boss’s henchmen, from whom the accountant was forced to rescue her. At the end, torn and bloodied, he and the woman marched into the special prosecutor’s office, placed the package in his hands, and went out without waiting to be thanked, eager to get to a justice of the peace who would marry them.

It was a tight, suspenseful story, and if the love angle was predictable there was something about the villains, their flat vernacular and working habits, that suggested the author had borrowed them from life rather than the movies or the pages of his competitors’ books. I wondered where in his herky-jerk resumÉ Booth had come into close enough contact with the breed to collect their idiosyncrasies like blood samples. It left me thirsting for more Booth. I saved
Tough Town
and
Bullets Are My Business
for later and poked another tape into the cassette player.

“ ‘He was too tired to think,’” he dictated in his scratchy monotone, “ ‘or maybe he just didn’t want to. He drank from the flat pint and sat outside the wobbly circle of gasoline-generated light and watched the moths hurl themselves against the glass as mindlessly as waves smacking the shore. And he didn’t think, didn’t think.’” A bottle gurgled, lips pulled away from it with a kissing sound. “Okay, Tolstoy, you’ve got your beginning and your end. Now all you have to do is write twenty chapters to stick in between.”

I’d been half-dozing, the raspy sentences grinding the edges of my subconscious with no meaning. The drinking noises and the slight lift in his tone when he’d stopped dictating snatched me awake. One phrase had come through, but I’d needed the hand up to realize its importance. I rewound the tape and played back the passage. At “gasoline-generated light” I hit the stop button. I picked up
Deadtime
Story and paged backward from the end, past the touching scene in the adjoining cabin when the woman clutched the bundle of evidence to her breasts in lieu of the man she loved, to the one in the accountant’s cabin. Once again he grimly wrapped the ledgers and scribbled the prosecutor’s name on the slick white paper in the throbbing light of a lamp hooked up to a generator. There were moths there as well.

The ending he’d dictated wasn’t that much different from the end of the original version of
Paradise Valley;
the last scene in that one took place in a motel on a lake. He liked to write about anonymous lodgings in remote locations. Someone else knew about some other things he liked. The potato was ripe.

I called the Edencrest Retirement Home and got a nurse who said Mrs. Milbocker was busy at the opposite end of the building. I said I’d hold. I listened to Burt Bacharach for twelve minutes.

“This is Mrs. Milbocker.”

“Amos Walker again. Can you put Fleta Skirrett on the telephone?”

“I can’t, Mr. Walker. She had an episode.”

The receiver creaked in my grip. “What kind of episode?” She couldn’t have died on me. Booth would have scorned to write a scene like that.

“Nothing serious. She forgot she ate lunch and accused a nurse of plotting to starve her to death. She became so agitated we had to sedate her. You won’t be able to talk to her before tomorrow morning.”

“How late is your shift?”

“We’re shorthanded. I’m on until midnight.”

I gave her my home number. She already had the one at the office. “If she wakes up tonight, ask her where Gene Booth likes to fish.”

8

T
he Alamo Motel clung to its spot on West Jefferson Avenue like a half-dead bush to the side of a cliff. It offered four tiers of rooms exactly the same size, entered from outside by way of elevated boardwalks with open staircases zigzagging between. The nearest thing to a renovation it had undergone in recent years was a brief period during which the
M
in
Motel
had been replaced with an
H
on the sign in front; an attempt to lure conventioneers from the Westin and Pontchartrain hotels downtown. It hadn’t worked, and after a while the
M
had gone back up to reassure transients they’d have a place to park. Jungle growth sprouted through cracks in the asphalt lot, green grunge and hornets’ nests occupied the brass-plated carriage lamps mounted on the outside walls above the doors to the rooms. That was as much life as the place showed most days.

I parked next to a handicapped slot where a Dodge truck stood on blocks with a young elm grown up through its front bumper and mounted the stairs to the top floor. The original owner’s aspirations showed in the numbering of the rooms: They started on the ground floor at 300, jumped from 310 to 400 on the next, and ended on the fourth floor at 610, where Lowell Birdsall lived. The idea was to make forty rooms seem like more than six hundred. It didn’t stop the owner from going broke when the Edsel bottomed out. The Fraternal Order of No-Necked Sicilians had owned it for a couple of years, intending to run it into the ground and burn it for the insurance, but it was a stubborn organism that refused to lose money beneath a certain level, and they sold it for what they had put into it. Now it survived as a combination welfare hotel for permanent residents and a stopping-place for visitors who wanted something a little more private than the Y but didn’t mind sharing their quarters with a few silverfish. Both the fire marshal and the building inspector overlooked the code violations at the request of the police, who enjoyed the convenience of knowing where to look when the mayor needed a drug bust.