A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (26 page)

Fleta Skirrett bared her teeth at me from a canvas. Her blue eyes gleamed like the bottoms of polished china bowls, as big in the painting as half-dollars. Her dress was tiger orange, ripped loose from one white shoulder to expose her cleavage, and she had one orange-nailed fist wrapped around the handle of an automatic pistol, a shiny .32 like the one Glad Eddie Cypress had pointed at me. Her black pupils were as big around as my thumbs and had tiny flaws in their centers.

I stepped closer. They weren’t flaws at all, but twin reflections of a brutish-looking male coming her way with a knife; not in the melodramatic overhand grip so popular among pulp artists who had never taken part in a knife fight or even witnessed one, but in the scooping underhand of the professional blade man. That was impressive. That was research. The reflections themselves wouldn’t have shown at all once the picture was reduced for reproduction on the cover of a cheap paperback. Lowell Senior was an artist. The industry hadn’t known what it had, in him or Booth. The definition of art in America.

“Creepy shit, huh?” The neighbor’s voice shook a little. “No wonder he got depressed. Think he’ll be all right?”

“He’ll live. If he were all right he wouldn’t have stepped off the chair.”

“Well, duh.”

I was only half listening, to him and myself. Birdsall’s dehumidifier was whirring in its corner. I went over and turned the dial all the way to the left. Silence came down with a thump. The reservoir had been emptied recently. He’d thought to preserve his collection beyond his own death. That was dedication. He was his father’s son.

The Domino’s pizza box was gone from the vintage laminated table. A green marbleized clamshell box took up half the space it had occupied. It was the kind archivists use to store and display valuable papers. I knew what was inside, but I went over anyway and tipped back the lid.

I looked at a stack of coarse discolored sheets with dog-eared corners. They bore the Alamo letterhead, with the old two-letter telephone prefix and no ZIP, because the code had yet to be invented when the sheets were printed. Motels were still a novel concept then; even visitors to the Alamo didn’t mind letting the folks back home know where they’d landed. The sheets were covered with dense typing, with here and there whole paragraphs scratched out and thickly scribbled notes substituted between the lines. I’d seen it before and knew what it was, but I got out the note Eugene Booth had written Louise Starr when he returned her check and compared them. Handwriting can be forged, but not the wandering
a
and
o
of Eugene Booth’s old Smith-Corona.

Someone groaned, a long grating sound like rusted metal parts scraping against each other, and I turned away from the box. Lowell Junior was coming around.

28

I
t was early afternoon when I got back to the office. I wasn’t hungry, but I’d stopped at the desperate diner for a BLT to boost my protein and help out the owner. When he rang up the sale on his old-fashioned cash register, the little number tab looked like a tombstone. I circled my block twice, then found a space two streets over. I walked through one of those spring rains that doesn’t do much more than stamp circles in the dust on the sidewalk. It didn’t even get my head wet.

I smelled an official visit all the way from the landing. It reeked of leather and gun oil and the lime-based aftershave they give away with a year’s subscription to
Police Times.
I sagged against the hallway wall and smoked thirty seconds’ worth of cigarette. Then I flipped it into the fire bucket and went on.

Sheriff’s Detective VaxhÖlm was standing in front of the framed
Casablanca
poster when I let myself into the waiting room. He had on the same shooting jacket with the leather patch and what might have been the same black knitted tie and button-down white shirt. He didn’t turn as I entered. The Huron nose and cheekbones stood out against the door to the inner office like an advertisement for chewing tobacco.

“Never could see what the shouting was about,” he said. “If he were any kind of man he’d have ignored the woman and kept the nightclub.”

I said, “The woman was Ingrid Bergman. Anyway the movie would’ve been over in half an hour.”

“It looks old.”

“It’s an original.”

“You ought to lock your door. Someone might steal it.”

“I need the business more than I do the poster. Run into much construction on the way down?”

“I drove around it, on the shoulder. There are some advantages to being a cop. Not damn many.” He turned his frozen blue eyes on me. “What did you do with the box?”

“It didn’t come in a box.”

“I’m not talking about the poster anymore. Old Man Erwig says you told him there was a box belonging to Booth in Cabin Two. There wasn’t any box when I checked.”

“His name’s Erwig?”

“Let’s g-go inside.”

I unlocked the door and held it for him. He looked around, but that was just habit. He turned in the middle of the floor to face me. “My aunt would prescribe a leech for that eye.”

“Medicine woman?”

“No, just nuts. Should I know how you got it?”

I shook my head. He pulled the customer chair to the side of the desk so it wouldn’t be between us and used it. I picked up my mail from the floor under the slot, shuffled through it on the way over, and laid it alongside the blotter when I sat down. It didn’t contain any checks or ransom notes.

“It’s at my house,” I said. “There isn’t anything in it but a few bottles of liquor, Booth’s brand. We can swing by there and you can take it back with you. Whiskey isn’t my cup of tea. It isn’t even a good label.”

“What else was in the box?”

I shook my head. He could take that any way he wanted and I was too tired to care which he chose.

He changed directions. “We got the report back from Lansing this morning on the blood and tissue samples we took from Booth. You didn’t answer your telephone so I buzzed down to deliver it in person. You want raw numbers, or can I do it in English?”

“I flunked math.”

“He had enough alcohol in his system to rub down a rhinoceros. County M.E. says with a load like that he couldn’t have gotten out of bed, much less buckled his belt around his neck and climbed up on a chair and jumped off. So what looked like a tidy little suicide isn’t. And what were
you
doing when Booth was making like a piÑata?”

“Sleeping it off, like I said. I had enough alcohol in my system to rub down an Impala. A sixty-seven Im-pala with chrome-reverse wheels.”

“What was in the box, Walker?”

“We can talk about that after I tell you who killed Booth.”

He sat back and crossed his legs. His olive-drab trousers were starched and pressed into a lethal crease and his brown half-boots gleamed like furniture. “Theory?”

“Confession.”

“Yours?”

“Lowell Birdsall’s. You don’t know him.”

“I’d like to. When were you planning to tell me this?”

“I just found out myself. I guessed it this morning, but we both know what you’d have said to that. I went over to his place to ask him about it and wound up saving his neck. Literally. He tried to hang himself the same way he did Booth. He’s a big boy, lots of bulk and muscle. He didn’t need help.”

“He told you this? Where is he now, jail?”

“Detroit General. It’s a hospital. Talking killed time while we were waiting for EMS. The local cops don’t know he’s anything more than an attempted suicide. I was saving the rest for you.”

“What’s to stop him from walking away?”

“I can see you don’t handle many suicides. It’s illegal in this state. It’s the only crime they can’t nail you with if you pull it off. If you fail, you’re committed for seventy-two hours of mandatory psychiatric evaluation. There’s a pair of eyes on you the whole time. So your department has three days to obtain a warrant and ship him back to Black Lake.”

“Cheboygan,” he corrected. “That’s where the county lockup is. Give me the rest.”

I gave him everything about the case except Glad Eddie Cypress and the existence of Officer Duane Booth’s written report on Roland Clifford’s conduct during the 1943 riot; in fact I left out the mob angle altogether. It didn’t figure in and I had a promise to keep that involved the old police report. VaxhÖlm, writing in his notebook, asked me for the details on the Allison Booth killing and I referred him to Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler.

“That one’s fuzzy as hell,” he said. “Who killed Booth’s wife?”

“According to Birdsall Junior, it was Birdsall Senior. For a gifted artist his powers of observation were spotty. Every time he looked at a woman outside his work all he saw was the bottom half. He hit on Allison while Booth was in New York and she was feeling lonely. Maybe she thought it was innocent, dinner and drinks with a friend of her husband’s; the cops who investigated the case didn’t spend any time on that angle once they’d made up their minds about her, so we may never know. Say she put up a fight when she found out it wasn’t so innocent. Birdsall Senior panicked, or became enraged when he found out he wasn’t God’s gift to this particular woman. That many stab wounds doesn’t suggest premeditation.”

“Why’d he have a knife if he didn’t plan it?”

“It was the fifties. You weren’t a man or a boy if you went out of the house without a folding knife in your pocket. The deepest wound was less than three and a half inches. That’s consistent with a Boy Scout blade. He punched her full of holes, probably in his car, then drove her to the first deserted street and dumped her into a window well.”

“The investigating officers must have impounded his car.”

“They didn’t find anything. Remember, they didn’t have the equipment we have now, and Birdsall did a good job cleaning up after himself. He was an artist, a detail man. You ought to see his paintings. He knew how to use a knife, too. He did his homework.”

“You said he had an alibi.”

“One of his models said they were working that night. She was probably one of his conquests; Junior said he bedded all his models. The cops could have cracked her if they’d leaned hard enough, but they had only the salesgirl’s identification of Birdsall as the man she saw picking up Allison and it was one woman’s word against another’s. Also they were just going through the motions. A dead tramp is a dead tramp.”

He frowned at his notebook. “The son knew?”

“He suspected. He’s sure his mother knew, or suspected, and that’s why she drove her car into a bridge abutment. Suicide’s getting to be a family tradition.”

“That doesn’t explain why the son killed Booth.”

“Sure it does. He’s practically a shut-in, living and working out of the same room his father used for a studio, surrounding himself with Lowell Senior’s paintings and thousands of lurid paperback murder mysteries. All those stories have one thing in common, aside from flashy dames and tough talk: the hero always wins and the murderers are punished. It’s been a comfort to him all these years, living with his father’s crimes— murder
and
betrayal—and the fact that he was never punished. He couldn’t kill his father. His father’s dead. When I came around asking questions, stirring up all those old emotions, the books weren’t enough.”

I got
Bullets Are My Business
out of the belly drawer of the desk and skidded it across the top. “P.I. yarn,” I said. “That character with the broken nose is Booth. Birdsall Senior used him as the inspiration for all the tough monkeys on the covers he illustrated. Birdsall Junior grew up looking at those paintings and later reading the books, and got confused. He told his neighbor he was attending a pulp convention in Cleveland last weekend. I called the
Plain Dealer
today before I went to see him. There weren’t any pulp conventions going on within a hundred miles of the city last weekend. Instead Lowell drove up to Black Lake where he knew Booth would be working, strung him up by his belt, and tore a piece of handwriting out of Booth’s manuscript to stand for a suicide note. He was no stranger to suicide, and when he let himself in and found him passed out on the bed, the rest was just muscle. He knew everything he needed to about slipping locks and arranging a crime scene from the hundreds of books he’d read. The loose window latch even gave him a chance to lock up after. Of course the manuscript went with him—he was a collector. By the time he confessed to me he had himself talked into believing that was the reason he killed Booth. It wasn’t. The motive wasn’t strong enough for murder. It wasn’t even strong enough to make him kill himself. That takes guilt. Guilt and rage.

“Booth let him down,” I said. “He wasn’t there to protect his wife from Birdsall’s father, and he didn’t do anything about it after she was murdered. He looked like a hero, but he didn’t behave like one. What’s a boy to do when he can’t believe in his own father and the substitute he picked out of a book betrays him too? He writes his own ending.”

The telephone stepped on my closing line. I snatched up the receiver and snarled into it.

“I didn’t expect flowers,” Louise Starr said after a pause. “I can get along without a call. I wasn’t prepared to have my head bitten off. Is this a comment on last night? I get better reviews from Kirkus.”

I apologized. I apologized for not calling her too. I shut my mouth before I could think of something else to apologize for.

“Are you all right? You sound terrible.”

“I’m more tired than terrible. I’ve been lifting weights. I found Booth’s manuscript.” I met the blue-ice depths of VaxhÖlm’s glare.

“Does that mean you know who killed him?”

“Yeah. Can I call you back? I’m in the middle of an official visit.”

“The police?”

“Yeah. You’ll have to wait for the manuscript. They’ll, want it until they close the file.”

VaxhÖlm sat back and directed his attention to
Custer’s Last Stand
on the wall beside the desk.

“I hope they clear it in time to make next year’s spring list. Is it complete? How long is it? Could you tell if it needs much fixing?”

“I didn’t have time to read it. I can’t think why. I called nine-one-one before I started, just to make sure I wouldn’t be interrupted for a couple of hours. I really have to call you back.” I cradled the receiver.