A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (12 page)

“Never happen. They don’t pick ‘em for their imagination.” He took a thoughtful sip, leaving some whiskey in the bottom of the glass. “You don’t suppose your client is doubling up on you?”

I drank a little to look as if I were keeping up. “She’s got faith in me. Besides, she can’t afford it. She could barely afford to pay you the advance you threw back in her face.”

“I didn’t. You’ve got the note. Well, I’m buffaloed. I haven’t been with a woman in ten years, so it isn’t a jealous husband. Even if there were jealous husbands anymore. Country’s gone so far toward hell if I wrote the way I wrote back when I could write, no self-respecting horny kid would bother to hide one of my books under his mattress.”

“Maybe he’s a fan.”

“Maybe I’m Leo fucking Tolstoy.” He drank up, then frowned at my glass. “There’s dust on top of your booze, son. Don’t tell me you’re one of these punks drinks Jack and Coke.” He twisted in his seat, scooped up the bottle, and refilled us both. His hand was steady enough to pour nitroglycerine.

“One of us ought to go easy. I’m pretty sure this guy is heeled.”

“ ‘Heeled.’” He blew through his nose. “You’ve been reading too much Booth. You say he’s got a gat, a heater, a rod, a roscoe, a piece? I never knew a cop or a crook to call it anything but a gun.”

“That was before you guys changed the language.”

“The language changes itself. You can’t tip a can up over it and keep it in, that’s the trouble. I’ve got a hundred brand-new pages that read like Middle English: Coffin nails instead of cigarettes, streetsweepers instead of shotguns. A car’s a crate, a bodyguard’s a goon, a corpse is meat. You should’ve seen what I went through when I had to write about a real heater or a crate or a hunk of meat in a skillet. Dames instead of girls. Well, women. If I ever called Allison a dame, she’d’ve brained me with Webster’s Second.”

He went silent then and drank. He wasn’t as sober as he looked. Bringing up his wife had kicked the braces out from behind the canvas front. He let his chin fall to his chest. He might have been faking it to discourage questions. That made it time to ask one that counted.

“Did you ever find out who killed her?”

His head came up in millimeters, as if he were raising it with a winch. The shelf of crisp gray hair had fallen onto his forehead and his eyes glared out from under it through the thick lenses of his glasses with a sudden naked lucidity.

“She was just a stamp to them. A lousy one-center on a postcard. The bastards didn’t even care who else read it as long as I got the message.”

“What message?”

The winch let go then and his chin drifted back down. He made purring noises with his lips and the glass in his hand tilted, slopping some of its contents onto the Indian rug. I got up and took it from him and carried it and mine into the bathroom and emptied them into the sink. He was snoring loudly and with enthusiasm when I came back out; his head was all the way back now and I saw his molars. I screwed the cap back on the bottle. That would slow him down half a second.

I left the cabin and pulled the door shut until it locked. I couldn’t turn the bolt. I hoped he’d wake up enough to do that later. I glanced toward Cabin Five. I made it a long look. The cabin was still dark and the pickup camper was gone. He had a quiet motor. I hadn’t even heard him pull out.

13

T
he few hits of Seagram’s I’d taken were still ringing in my skull. I wasn’t hungry by then, but to absorb the alcohol I ate the sandwiches I’d brought and drank all the coffee in the Thermos before going to bed. The mattress was too soft and the springy metal slats creaked like ship’s rigging whenever I turned over. It was going to be a long night.

Wrong again.

Something was knocking against the hull of my fishing boat. I lay on the deck staring up at the bright sky and tried to ignore it, but after a little silence the knocking came again: five rapid raps, confidence mixed with impatience. It wasn’t just a piece of driftwood clunking against the waterline.

I opened my eyes to the dazzle of the sun bounding off the lake. I hadn’t closed the curtains over the window. Dust-motes swarmed like tiny bright golden bees as far up as the exposed rafters. Out across the water someone was trying to pull-start an outboard motor and not having much luck; there would be a series of half-hearted pops followed by a clank-clank and an emphysemic wheeze and then a pause before he tried again. For a second I thought that was the noise that awoke me. Then again the five knocks, blows now with the side of the fist, hard enough to bounce the panels.

“Eight o’clock, Petunia! Breakfast call! Rise and shine and grab your pants.”

I’d gone first for the Smith & Wesson on the belt of my jeans crumpled on the floor beside the bed. Then I recognized Booth’s voice and swung my legs over and pulled them on. I got to the door just as he started knocking again. He stood there with his fist raised, combed and scrubbed and bright-eyed with a clean work shirt tucked into the same trousers he’d had on the night before. His eyes were clear behind his glasses and his face shone from the razor.

“You look like you just washed up on the beach,” he said. “You need to cut down on your drinking.”

I caught a whiff of eye-opener on his breath.

“You’re not going to turn out to be one of those pain-in-the-ass morning people, are you?”

“Only on vacation, son. I’m not a breakfast person either, but there’s a place in town that serves steak-and-eggs cooked in lard like it’s nineteen fifty-eight. How long will it take you to scrape off the top layer?”

“Give me fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll give you ten. It’s a celebration. We outlasted Cabin Five. He was gone when I got up.”

“He was gone when we went to bed. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe he was expecting somebody’s wife and she never came and he went home. Maybe what I thought was a gun was a box of chocolates.”

“You know what they say. You never know what you’re going to get.”

“The hell you don’t. They put a chart right in the box.”

“Don’t trust it. I never worked from an outline even in the old days. Three minutes gone, friend. Try not to cut your nose off.” He strode back toward Four, whistling. It’s hard to whistle that consistently off-key. It is its own kind of perfect pitch.

Seven minutes later, doused with cold spray and shaved and tucking in a fresh sport shirt, I climbed into the passenger’s side of his car, which he already had running. I’d decided at the last minute to leave the .38 in the cabin, hidden on the floor behind the radiator. If the Yankee was still around and his jacket had been hiding a gun, a shoot-out in broad daylight didn’t seem his style.

Inside, the Plymouth smelled of stale tobacco and dust. A fine skin of Michigan road dust coated the dash and there was a cigarette burn in the vinyl above the ashtray, but apart from that the car was tidy and when he backed around and pulled into the road the engine ran smoothly and the gears meshed without hesitation. He drove with one hand on the crossbar and a Pall Mall burning between the fingers of his other hand resting on the window ledge. The odometer read too low for a car that old; it had rolled over a couple of hundred miles back. Either the car had a new motor and transmission or he took better care of it than he did of himself. He drove two to three miles over the limit and switched off the turn indicator after it had served its purpose.

I said, “If you keep on like this you’re liable to give senior drivers a good name.”

He blew through his nose. “If the world made sense, everyone would add ten miles an hour to his speed for every year past sixty.”

“I figured you’d be sleeping in after last night.”

“I don’t need near as much as I used to. That’s the part that makes sense.” He stuck the cigarette between his teeth and used both hands to wheel around a minivan waddling along at twenty. “Did I sing any of the old songs?”

He asked the question in a casual tone without taking his eyes off the road. I answered just as casually.

“Not a note. The years on beer don’t seem to have softened you up any.”

The little silence that followed said he wasn’t satisfied. But he dropped the subject. “You wouldn’t know it now, but this place used to be the fishing capital of the Midwest. I saw Cesar Romero drinking with his buddies in a bar once. He had on a week’s beard and a dirty cap.”

We were driving through the boarded-up downtown. A middle-ager in Spandex and a racing helmet was unlocking his bicycle from the lamppost in front of the local branch of a national bank chain and a woman carrying a plastic tub full of folded laundry stood on a corner waiting for the light to change. A pair of gulls skipped and flapped at each other over a wad of gum stuck on the sidewalk. I said, “I wouldn’t hold out for Cesar, but it’s still early in the season.”

“Even then they’ll be out at the malls. But what the hell. In ten years everyone’ll be doing his shopping on the ’net and today’s kids will mope around pining for the days when they used to hang out in front of the Gap. Meanwhile there’s plenty of places to park downtown.” He turned the corner and glided into the curb two doors down from a yellow brickfront with
CAPTAIN KIDD’S
painted on the front window in skirling letters.

The dim cool interior was done in a nautical motif, teakwood paneling and booths with spoked helms cut out of the partitions. Piped-in music tinkled out of a soporific piano. At Booth’s request, a teenage hostess in puffy sleeves and a tricorne hat led us between tables to a deck out back beneath a canvas awning. On the way we passed scattered couples, one or two lone diners, and a tableful of white-haired men in baseball caps and cocoa straw hats, the last group haw-hawing over platters of bacon and mounds of fluffy scrambled eggs.

“Locals,” said Booth. “I swear it’s the same bunch that occupied the same spot twenty years ago, when this was Gus’s Tavern and there was a moosehead hanging over where the salad bar is now. You wonder what they still have to talk about.
I
wonder what happened to that moosehead.”

“Maybe that’s what they talk about.”

The land fell off sharply from the deck, giving us a view of the greater portion of the lake. It was Friday and several more fishermen were out, casting from the docks and wading offshore and rowing boats. An eight-footer with an outboard spluttered across, cutting a
V
in the silken surface. I hoped the ride was worth all the trouble the boater had gone through to get it started.

I decided it was. It was good there with the sun on the water and the green smell of the needles and something rustling down among the reeds, a muskrat building its den or a hungry fox looking for the first catch of the morning. It was a connection, and it was strong enough to pull a lot of people, men mostly, out of their offices and tractor-trailer rigs and the back seats of limousines and all the way up here in pursuit of a thing they could get cheaper and better prepared in a good restaurant close to home. Either that, or they couldn’t stand the women they lived with.

A different girl in the same outfit took our orders for steak-and-eggs and black coffee and went away. Booth offered me his pack and we both took one and I lit us up. The first drag made me cough. I hadn’t smoked unfiltered in years.

He noticed. “CBS bought the detective I used in
Bullets
in fifty-nine. The series tanked after thirteen weeks, mostly because Winston was the sponsor and all the good guys had to smoke filters. You knew who the murderer was the minute he lit up a Camel.”

I grinned. “That was just about the time you got out of publishing, wasn’t it?”

“I got out of publishing the way Trotsky got out of Russia. I submitted a three-page outline for my next book to an editor I’d been working with for six years and he bounced it back without an explanation. I flew to New York to discuss it. He said
Some of My Best Friends Are Killers
hadn’t performed as well as expected—that’s how he put it, ‘didn’t perform as well as expected,’ like it was a juggler or a dancing chihuahua—and he thought I should take a year or so off and find my inspiration. I said if I took a year off all I’d find would be my own death from starvation. That’s when he said it.”

Breakfast came. We sorted out blood-rare from medium-well and scrambled from over-easy—he liked his eggs to run from a harsh word—got our cups filled, and the waitress went off to see to the big group.

Booth covered his eggs with pepper. “Where was I?”

“ ‘That’s when he said it.’ ”

“Yeah. He said all the great writers had to starve before they produced their best work. I hit him.”

“With what?”

“His desk, I wish. I laid him out with a straight right, the same one that got me fired as a sparring partner. Gashed two knuckles on his teeth and had to get a tetanus shot. It was beautiful. Cops arrested me at my hotel, I did a weekend in the Tombs. Publisher dropped the charges, which was the dirtiest thing anybody ever did to me in that town. I’d have held out for a jury of writers and told them on the stand what that son of a bitch said to me in his office. After that the verdict wouldn’t matter. That would have been the note to end a career on.”

“I heard you missed deadlines and reneged on contracts.”

“Everyone misses deadlines. I never backed out of a deal in my life. Who told you that—Mrs. Starr?” He didn’t wait for the answer. “That’s New York. It’s the only civilized society in history that bought into the mythology it made up for itself. Well, there’s Hollywood, but I said
civilized.
No, they didn’t boot me for being unreliable. My books stopped making money. That’s the only unredeemable sin.”

My steak was as thin as a placemat and nearly as tough. I sawed at it until my wrists got tired and then I ate my eggs. They’d been cooked in lard, just as he said. I’d forgotten what a lethal dose of cholesterol can do for flavor. “Why did your books stop selling?”

“Why does anything? I started telling the truth. Did you read
Some of My Best Friends Are Killers?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t. Nobody wants fiction to be real. The people who buy books and go to the movies want the hero to snatch the heroine off the conveyor belt just before the buzzsaw gets her. My editor made me rewrite it. He was right. For what I wanted to say I should’ve written straight journalism, but I’d had my fill of that when I did it to eat while I wrote my books at night. Even after the rewrite there was just enough truth in it to turn away readers in herds.”