A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (24 page)

“Next time ask Uncle Sarge just to go ahead and buy you an ICBM,” I said.

That made him stop to think; or maybe it was the bore of the .44. “He’s not my uncle. He’s my cousin, once removed.”

“Looks like twice. Sit down.”

“On what?” He was several paces from the nearest chair.

“On the floor. Make like I’m going to tell you a story.”

He hesitated. He might not have been disobedient, just reluctant to get back down when getting back up had been so much trouble; he’d have a stiff knee for days. In any case he took too long and I stepped in and gave him what I’d given Cousin Sargent. He had a harder head. He managed to form an expression of indignation before his eyes turned to glass. He folded into a tidy pile at my feet.

“Finished?”

The voice belonged to a new piece on the board. I moved to one side to broaden my field of view. Eddie Cypress stood in the doorway that led to the rest of the suite. He had on a thin blue cashmere pullover against bare skin and gray corduroy slacks. The nickel plating on the light automatic in his right hand shone like a mirror. He seemed as comfortable with it as he was with the presence of Sargent Hurley’s crumpled form blocking his way. It didn’t annoy him even so much as a misplaced suitcase.

I said, “A thirty-two, Eddie?”

For the first time his made-over face showed pain. “It’s all I could rustle up. None of my old contacts will have anything to do with me. I can’t even make out what language is stamped on this piece of shit. But it goes bang when I pull the thingie, and like the man said, no one wants to get shot with anything. You the exception?”

“Are you?” I had the magnum trained on him.

His trademark smile was as shiny as the .32. “Well, we can do this all day, except I called the desk when I heard Herb hit the floor the first time. I’m registered in this suite. Who do you think the dick will shoot?”

“Hotel dicks don’t shoot. And you didn’t call. You haven’t been legit long enough to pick up the habit.”

“Why don’t let’s wait and see?”

I moved the shoulder not connected to the gun. “I cleared my calendar.”

“Shit.” He laid the pistol on a lamp table and turned away from the door. “Try not to trip over Sarge. We wouldn’t want you blowing a hole through the next two rooms. You might hit a low-flow toilet and drain a lake somewhere in Pakistan.”

I held the magnum at hip level and stepped over the publicist. This room contained a white-enameled sleigh bed, neatly made, a sitting area, and a massive breakfront containing rows of books behind leaded glass with a refrigerator and mini-bar built in. Tasteful watercolors of Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River hung in frames on the wall adjacent the window, whose drapes were open to provide a view of their inspiration. Cypress broke a can of Coke out of the refrigerator and poured it into a glass containing ice cubes and nothing else. “Booze? Soda? I guess you call it pop here. I gave up the hard stuff after Crazy Joe went down clear back in seventy-two, and I had a hollow leg even then. Haven’t touched a drop since.”

“I’m fine.”

“Only thing I miss is the noise the ice used to make when I poured the liquor. It sounded like the polar cap breaking up. But not as loud as the guns that night in Umberto’s. I can still see Joey sitting there with his face in his side of steamed clams.”

“You shot Joey Gallo?”

“No. Hell, no. I still had my cherry then. I was in the party. It was Joey’s wedding anniversary, he wanted everybody to have a good time. I was running the juke route in Jersey for the Profaci family. It was like delivering papers, only without a bike and with a cheap Saturday-night buster in my pocket—cheaper than that fucking thirty-two—because I expected some Puerto Rican son of a bitch to cut my throat any minute for a bag of quarters.”

“Youth.” I was beginning to feel like a plaster saint standing there holding the .44.

He drank a slug of Coke and walked over to the window. “Some view. Lots of bones at the bottom of that river. Wish I was around in Prohibition. My old man told me stories. I hate these glass buildings. I keep asking them to book older hotels. Publishers don’t listen. These places make me feel like a germ on a slide.”

“That’s a reach.”

“Now you’re just a disappointment. You had my attention there when you stepped on Herb and Sarge, but then you had to go and spoil it. I didn’t see your tambourine when you came in.”

“That’s because I traded it for a P.I. license years ago.” I took the deep-bodied revolver off cock and laid it next to the .32. “That the same piece you had covered up north?”

“Sport, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’d be a lot more convincing if you didn’t keep calling me ‘sport.’ You should have gotten rid of it when you took off the sunglasses and cap.”

“You nailed me. I’m guilty as hell of buzzing up to Styxville, U.S.A., for a little
p
and
q
in the middle of a twenty-city book tour. That a felony in this state or do I just fork over a fine?”

“You checked out just in time. Your next-door neighbor swung from his belt the next morning. That would have just brought back memories of the bad old days.”

He turned away from the window. His age showed through the cosmetic work when he wasn’t smiling, as if he’d asked the surgeons to tailor it to his grin. Aside from that he didn’t look upset or surprised. It wouldn’t have meant anything if he had; Booth’s death had made the papers, and even if it hadn’t he’d had a lifetime of practice at controlling those muscles that give away most of the rest of us, with eighteen months of legal coaching and three weeks of federal grand jury testimony on top of it. “I don’t know a damn thing about that, Walker. That’s the truth, swear on my father’s grave. You know how he finished.”

“I heard he got greedy. Then he got dead. I’d swear on the grave of a mook like that I went to bed with Mother Teresa.”

He held up a manicured finger. No polish; that was very Frank Costello. “That’s one. One’s all you get. I loved my old man. I bawled like a baby all the time they were cremating him.”

“Then you went back to your juke route. Working for the same mob that killed him.”

“I bet you rent
The Godfather
every chance you get.” The smile this time was tired, not the one he wore for company. “What’d you expect me to do, declare war on the entire Cosa fucking Nostra? Eugene Booth might have written it that way, but books end. The world doesn’t and you have to live in it. I swallowed what happened to the old man, choked it down like the sourest goddamn potato since Job got boils and went to work running numbers for Genovese. The juke route came later. I gave all my pay to my mother and it spent just as good as if none of it ever passed through the same hands that made her a widow. That’s the year I turned thirty-five. Except I was fourteen. So when I swear on Tommy Cypress’ grave I’m making an oath on the only pure thing I know.”

I fished a Winston out of the pack in my shirt pocket, looked at it, and put it back. “That in the book?”

“Go fuck yourself, Walker.” He gulped from his glass.

“So you knew it was Booth in Cabin Four. He didn’t know who you were. You hadn’t met. It takes a good eye to spot a celebrated author forty years after the celebration ended.”

“I read his obituary. That’s how I knew he was dead. I didn’t kill him. My score stands at fifteen and that’s where it’s going to stay.”

“I’d like to believe that. I’d like to believe you just happened to go up there to breathe the clean air the same time as Booth, who has a history with your late employers. You’d register under a phony name for privacy and disguise your famous face with a cap and glasses for the same reason. You’ve got enemies, so when someone knocks on your door you answer it with artillery support. Stealing someone else’s license plates is taking incognito a bit far, but let’s stretch and say that’s why you did it. It’s still not a serious enough beef to send the Cousins Hurley after me when I called you on it. Add a little murder and it all lines out.”

“The last part was Sarge’s idea. I’m out of practice in that area or I wouldn’t have gone along with it. You can take that as an apology if you want. I got scared.” He smiled at the thought, the Glad Eddie grin. “Hell, I guess I did. Funny, I never was scared all the time I was working the other side. This legitimate enterprise isn’t for sissies. Sit down, Sarge. You look beat. Ha.”

Hurley was swaying inside the doorway, squinting to make out who was which without his glasses. The violet swelling was more prominent on his left temple than his right. I’d been too enthusiastic the first time.

“Son of a bitch blindsided me,” he said thickly. “Otherwise—”

“Otherwise you’d be a rack of ribs. I know a little bit more about characters like Walker than you do. You’re not used to being the target. Grab yourself a drink. How’s Herb?”

“Still out. This bastard cracked his skull.”

“Not nearly,” I said. “I know the sound.” I excavated his latest pair of glasses and held them out. He squinted, then snatched them out of my hand and put them on.

He was braver when he could see. “We should have kicked the extra point in the parking lot.”

“I should have bought Microsoft at twelve. We all have our regrets. I’ll just lay these here.” I put the ruined pair on the same table with the guns. He’d walked right past them without seeing. “Let them sit till I’m gone. I might get the wrong idea.”

“And do what?”

“Ask Herb when he comes around.”

“Sit the hell down,” Cypress snapped. “Next time I’ll hire a real publicist. They know when the tour’s over.”

Hurley slammed a defiant handful of ice cubes from the brass bucket into a glass, emptied a dwarf bottle of Jack Daniel’s over it, and took the glass to a deep divan covered with thick gray fabric.

Cypress gestured with his glass toward a pair of club chairs in the opposite corner. He shook his head when I glanced at Hurley.

“Sarge used to work for the Democratic Party,” he said. “He’s heard worse.”

“I haven’t been in a booth since Reagan.”

“I never was. I was all set to vote for Muskie when eighteen months in Elmira got in the way.”

“It might have made the difference.”

He grinned.

I decided I was thirsty after all. I found a can of Vernor’s and threw in half a pony bottle of Absolut, which in Detroit is called a Joseph Campau. The glass fizzed all the way across the room.

Glad Eddie sat, crossed his legs, then put his Coke on a disk of pebbled glass with a floor lamp stuck through it and never touched it again, talking while the ice melted and turned the liquid from chocolate brown to the color of gun oil. He uncrossed his legs and rested his forearms on his thighs and slid his palms back and forth against each other with a rasping sound.

“I’m out now,” he said. “Out as you can get and still stay vertical. I’m relieved as all hell, but not for the reasons you might think. I’m sick of doing professional work for idiots.”

“So you went into publishing.” I drank. The vodka and ginger ale had a sweet clean bite.

He was looking at me, but he wasn’t listening. He was so caught up in what he’d started he even forgot to smile.

26

Y
ou heard there’s a million-dollar tag out on me?” Cypress asked.

I said, “It’s on the flap of your book. I figured if it wasn’t just hype you’d be part of some highway by now.”

“It’s real enough, but they put a hold on it until I’m yesterday’s news. Cops, reporters, and people who show up on
Entertainment Tonight
a lot are off limits; nobody’s death is worth the heat that comes after. It’s an incentive to stay on the
Times
list, I tell you.”

“Publish or perish.”

“My contract is for three books; but if whatever I write next doesn’t fly like
Prey Tell,
there won’t be a third. In a year or two you’ll find it on the remainder tables at ninety-nine cents a crack, by which time I’ll be on another kind of table, getting my organs harvested for science. The kicker is, what’s the next one going to be about? I told my life the first time. That’s what I meant about being scareder on this side of the blanket than I ever was on the other.”

“So hire another ghost.”

He frowned, going against the grain of his face work. It made him look like a wounded author. “Hey, I
wrote
every word that went into that book. The editors fixed the spelling and put in some commas and moved a couple of paragraphs around, but it’s one hundred percent Eddie Cypress, no soy substitutes. I sign my own work.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Yeah, okay, I walked into that one.” The grin flared and faded. “I only sent glads to the first three funerals, in the beginning when I figured I needed to advertise. Third time was in February, when they were out of season. I wound up paying through the nose in a little shit florist shop in Flushing for the sorriest display you ever saw. That cured me. But you know that. You read the book.”

I shook my head. “I thought I’d wait and not see the movie.”

“The
point,”
he went on, “is I’m not all that much of a priority or someone would’ve found a way to get rid of me before this. I put a fat shark in the tank and a couple of pilot fish, but the school swims on. I’m an open sore, not a mortal wound. I get to keep draining if I do New York an occasional favor.”

“Eugene Booth, for one.”

“Booth was just a test. You read
Paradise Valley?”

“Depends on which version you’re talking about.”

“That answers my question. Roland Clifford, what a nosebleed. The Detroit bosses built him up like a bad fighter, bought off all his betters and made him champ— hero to you. They owned him down to his skivvies, a cop on his way up, and that never hurts when you’re trying to build something permanent on the killing you made in the wartime black market. Booth’s brother partnered Clifford during the riot. When
Paradise Valley
came out the first time, Detroit blew a big old sigh of relief because the book backed up the official version. Not only that, it made Clifford out to be Paul Bunyan, which is something you can’t buy; it’s like tenure, it just keeps building and building.”