A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (16 page)

What I found was a very old sheet of eight-by-eleven paper, older even than the Alamo stationery and gone nearly as brown as the box itself, so that I didn’t notice it at first against the reinforced bottom. It started to tear when I tried to pull it out from under the bottles—it was as thin as tissue—so I took the bottles out one by one and laid them on the floor of the front seat. The paper peeled away from the corrugated fiberboard with a dry sound, like a mummy being unwrapped.

The report, typed into the prearranged blanks, was faded so badly I had to hold it up to the sun to read it. The legend at the top read DETROIT POLICE DEPARTMENT. The date, typed into a blank in the upper left-hand corner, was July 21, 1943. I had to stare hard to read the spidery signature scrawled at the bottom by a hand whose bones had long since been picked clean by sharks on the floor of the South Pacific.

17

I
used the pay telephone at the rest stop to call Louise Starr in Hazel Park. I got a chirpy recording telling me I’d reached Debra’s machine and if I left a message Debra would get back to me. I hung up before the beep, spent some more change, and got Mary Ann Thaler at Detroit Police Headquarters.

“Where the hell are you?” she greeted. “I’m getting Michigan Department of Transportation on the ID. Are you moonlighting as a trash-picker?”

“I’m calling from a toilet. Did you raise anything on the Allison Booth killing?”

“Plenty. I’ve been trying to call. You didn’t tell me her husband was famous.”

“I would have if I thought it was filed under
F.
What’s the difference?”

“More column inches equals more paperwork. Same old results: Sometimes you strike oil, sometimes mud. It’s a thick file. I cannot give you all of it over the phone. How far away are you?”

“Couple of hours.” I looked at my watch. “Say, six o’clock.”

“I’ll meet you at your office. It’s ten blocks closer to home.”

I had just enough quarters left to try Louise again. This time when Debra’s machine answered I waited for the tone and asked Louise to drop by the office after six.

No Ford Explorer was waiting for me with an angry Officer VaxhÖlm inside when I got back to the car. There was no roadblock across the entrance ramp to I-75 and the state trooper stationed at an emergency crossover two miles south didn’t give me a second look even though I swept past his cruiser five miles above the limit. Either the old man at the Angler’s Inn had forgotten all about the box or the unlawful removal of six bottles of spirits from a vacant motel room at Black Lake was not considered worth the gasoline required to bring them back. I still didn’t take a really deep breath and let it all the way out until I hit the first thick knot of rush-hour traffic outside Detroit.

An overheated radiator on a Toyota parked on the apron and five hundred gawkers slowed me to a stop just north of Eight Mile Road. By the time I got to the office it was almost seven and I had two women waiting in my little reception room.

”… sense of humor isn’t always appropriate, but I’ve never known him to violate a confidence, no matter how trivial,” Louise Starr was saying when I opened the door. She turned her cool smile on me. “Hello, Amos. Was the drive as bad as all that?”

I was feeling unbuttoned and my shirt was stuck to my back. I’d have felt the same in white tie and a cutaway with her around. She was seated on one end of the upholstered bench with her legs crossed in sheer hose with gray suede pumps on her feet. Today it was a business suit, gray, with a skirt that came to her knees and an unlined jacket not much heavier than her blouse, eggshell silk with a maroon scarf tied bandanna fashion around her neck. Platinum obelisks dangled from her ears, which she’d left exposed by drawing her hair back with barrettes. She was one of the few who had the ears for it, small and well-shaped and flat to her head.

“Cadillac had it worse,” I said. “Hello, ladies. Thank you both for waiting.”

“Just as long as you don’t thank us for our patience,” Mary Ann Thaler said. “That would be assuming way too much.”

The lieutenant was sitting on the other end of the bench with both sneakered feet flat on the floor and her forearms resting on her thighs. She had on loose faded jeans threadbare at the knees and a University of Detroit sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Her hair was gathered inside a black baseball cap with a curled bill and POLICE embroidered in yel low block capitals on the front of the crown. She wore her glasses and no makeup. The only thing missing from the expression on her face was the gun that belonged in front of it.

That made my decision easier. I hadn’t been sure which one got first crack, client or cop.
The Miss Manners Guide to P.I. Protocol
didn’t cover the situation. But I had to work in Detroit.

I pointed at Thaler. “You. They’re reviving
Dirty Harry
tonight at the DIA. You probably want to change.”

She stood and looked at the other woman. “Depends on your point of view, Mrs. Starr. In my line, people who are good at keeping confidences are a pain in the butt.”

“I never thought of it that way.” Louise took a card out of her handbag and held it up. “It was good talking with you, Lieutenant. You can reach me here if you ever change your mind.”

Thaler took it. “You’ve got my number if you need me. Nine-one-one.”

I excused myself to Louise and unlocked the door to the private office. Before I could get it open the lieutenant scooped a thick bundle bound with a rubber band off the coffee table and went inside.

“Home sweet stinkhole,” she said when we were seated on either side of the desk. “I thought you’d at least have changed the wallpaper by now.”

“It’s got tenure. Who put the hitch in your holster?” I reached back and switched on the fan on the win-dowsill. It purred and blew ash off the topsoil in the tray of butts on the desk.

“An hour in your waiting room.”

“I’ve got new magazines.”

“I saw.
Architectural Digest;
who do you think you’re kidding? I’ve seen your house.”

“Waiting is what cops do best. It wouldn’t be that Louise is got up like Katharine Hepburn and you look like one of the Dead End Kids. What happened to the revolution?”

She put on a smile then. A gun could still have gone in front of it. “She’s too tall. And someone should tell her you don’t wear dangling earrings with a business suit.”

“She’s wearing earrings?” I was grinning, first time that day. “Change your mind about what?”

“Change my mind.” Her face went flat. “Oh, that. She wants me to write about my experiences. You know:
Betsy Billystick, Girl Cop.
I said no. People who write up their life experiences have a habit of not hanging around long enough to have any others.”

“That’s just superstition.”

“Hello?” She tapped the
POLICE
on her cap, then rapped her knuckles on the desk. “Anyway, I’m no writer. Not like your man Booth. Is he still around, by the way?”

I plucked out a cigarette and smoothed it between my fingers. “He was last time I spoke to him.”

“He your client?”

“No.”

“Right, that would be Katharine Hepburn. Editor, writer, detective. Triple play.”

I lit up and blew smoke at the nicotine smudge on the ceiling.

“Fine,” she said, “have it your way. I only put on the back of my closet today and turned down lunch in West Bloomfield with a good-looking inspector from the Fifth to grub around amongst the spiders and forgotten bootleggers in the basement as a favor to you.” She shoved the bundle across the desk and sat back.

I unwound the rubber band, releasing a sprinkle of paper shavings and dust into the litter of same already on the blotter pad. “I heard the Fifth’s under investigation.”

“That’s why he had the time for lunch. The feds don’t like suspects getting in the way of a paper search. They’re just clerks with shoulder holsters.”

“Quantico turn down your application again?” I spread open the tattered cardboard file folder. The contents smelled like someone’s attic.

“To hell with Quantico. I’m studying for the bar.”

“And hoping to marry someone who is not a cop.”

“Who’s getting married? I was talking about lunch.”

“I’ll take you to lunch. Not in West Bloomfield, though. How about Greektown?”

“I see more cops in Greektown than at roll call. Anyway I can’t be seen breaking bread with no plastic badge. I’m up for city hall detail: nine to five and I don’t have to race the rest of the squad to the calendar for my vacation days.”

We were both silent while I paged through the old reports, eyewitness statements, inventories of evidence, newspaper clippings, and photos. The grainy black-and-white shots were printed on cheap police stock, without gloss, but the details were sharp enough to liven up anyone’s nightmares. Allison Booth didn’t look so pretty folded over and stuffed into the concrete square of a basement window well with one shoe off and her skirt hiked up to expose her girdle. Stretched naked on a porcelain table in the morgue she looked less like a department-store mannequin and more like a corpse: one eye swollen shut, the other open and staring, and dark bruised patches all over her chest and abdomen where the knife had gone in.

“The husband’s statement,” Thaler said when I came to a sheaf of typewritten sheets stuck together with a pitted paperclip, one of the old-fashioned kind that came to a point. “We went after his alibi hard when we found out about that last day, but it wouldn’t bend. He was having dinner with his editor and an assistant in New York at the time the coroner figured his wife died in Detroit. The restaurant staff backed them up.”

“ ‘We.’ “ I laid aside Booth’s statement unread and picked up another. “You were how old then?”

“My mother was still in elementary school, thank you. My father was starting junior high and they wouldn’t meet for ten years. When I say
we
I’m referring to the sacred and fraternal order of law enforcement professionals. The good guys for short.” “Tell that to the Fifth Precinct. What happened the last day?”

“I told you to read the newspapers. Didn’t you take my advice?”

“I never fail. The sacred and fraternal order of law enforcement professionals wasn’t any more forthcoming with the press then than it is now. That’s why I asked you to grub around amongst the forgotten bootleggers in the basement.”

“Spiders too. Don’t forget the spiders. One of them tried to steal my hat.” She tugged down on the bill as if to make sure it was still there. “You’re looking at the eyewitness statement now. A perfume counter clerk at the late lamented downtown Hudson’s happened to look out the glass doors just as a car pulled into the curb and the driver got out and opened the door on the passenger’s side for Allison Booth and she got in. The clerk didn’t know the Booths and she assumed it was the lady’s husband picking her up. Apparently they were pretty friendly. There’s a description.”

I looked at the second sheet. The clerk, whose name was Washington, said the car was dark blue, a late model, and thought it was either a Chevrolet or an Oldsmobile but couldn’t say for sure. The driver was six feet tall and well built, in his early thirties, with sandy hair worn in a crewcut. “That’s not a description of Booth,” I said.

“The detectives figured that out. Saunders and O’Hara their names were, both deceased. I checked them out in the computer. Anyway the fact it wasn’t her husband was all the more reason to take a second look at the husband. Especially when Miss Washington picked the driver out of a group of interviewees at headquarters later. That’s the next report. No, I’m wrong. That’s the autopsy sheet. Keep going.”

Death by desanguination
was the verdict. I turned over the post-mortem and found a report signed by Detective Michael Patrick O’Hara of Homicide. It was full of typos and strikeovers. He’d have been a lot more comfortable swinging a nightstick than hunched over a department Remington hunting and pecking with two fingers.

Thaler translated. “You can’t blame O’Hara and Saunders for thinking they were onto something. The husband and the driver knew each other. It wouldn’t have made the papers, though, because they both had alibis that held and there were no other eyewitnesses to back up Washington. The name’s there in the last paragraph. Birdsong or something.”

“Birdsall,” I corrected, reading. “Lowell Birdsall, Senior. Artist.”

18

R
ight.” Thaler was watching me. “He illustrated Booth’s books or something. They were pretty tight, or were before the murder.”

“Afterwards, too. According to Birdsall’s son.” I turned to the next sheaf. It was a typewritten transcript of Sergeant Owen Saunders’ interview with Birdsall, with no strikeovers and fewer typos; the work of a professional stenographer.

“There’s no accounting for people. But Birdsall was cleared, so I guess that was good enough for Booth. The model he was painting that night vouched for him. Fleta Skirrett?”

“Uh-huh.” Fleta’s statement was there too. She and Birdsall were shut up in the Alamo from a little before six until almost eleven that night. The autopsy report fixed time of death between seven and nine. Her Alzheimer’s or something had caused Fleta to leave all that out when we’d talked. “What about the Racket Squad? Booth had a beef with the local mob.”

“News to me. There’s nothing about it in the file. Didn’t they used to have some kind of rule about not going after wives or children?”

“That was the theory.”

“Yeah.” She made a theoretical sound in her throat. “Saunders and O’Hara closed it out as robbery-murder, assailant unknown. A pair of diamond earrings—a gift from Booth to celebrate a new contract with his publisher—was missing from Allison’s jewelry box, and two eyewitnesses in Hudson’s said she was wearing them in the store. Her wedding ring was gone too. If any of those items had ever surfaced in a pawnshop or anywhere else, it would have been in the file.
E
ither the thug had a good fence or he dealt them out of town or he panicked and threw them down the sewer grate.”

“Didn’t there used to be some kind of rule about not wearing diamonds before six?”