A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (13 page)

“What did you want to say? Sometimes the hero doesn’t get there before the buzzsaw?”

He nodded, chewing. “And when he does, sometimes he just turns up the speed.”

Just then the sun wrapped itself in a sheet of cloud and it was no longer good on the lake. The surface looked tarnished. There wasn’t a boat or a fisherman in sight. Thunder chuckled to the west, where the sky still looked clear. A sudden damp gust shook the awning. The waitstaff bustled out to strip the settings off the outside tables.

“These spring bumpers come in quick, but they blow through just as fast.” Booth sipped from his cup and resumed sawing at his steak. “Huron swallows them before they turn into anything. Otherwise they’d plane everything flat clear to the Atlantic.”

“Should we go in?”

“What for? Got something against getting wet? We’re born wet.” He grinned around a mouthful of eggs.

So it was going to be a contest. I sat back with my hair lifting in the stiffening wind. “People these days like more grits with their sugar. The kind of fiction you want to write might go over now.”

“I thought about that.”

“Is that why you’re rewriting
Paradise Valley?”

He picked up a slice of toast and buttered it. It had been about to blow off his plate. “Don’t put too much store in what’s on those tapes. I’ve got arthritis in my fingers and I thought I’d get more done if I tried dictating. I filled six hours and stopped.”

“Didn’t work?”

“It was too easy. They ought to outlaw anything that makes the creative process convenient. That’s why so much shit gets written on computers.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I don’t have to answer the question. I don’t have to sit here with you except I didn’t feel like eating alone this morning. Just why escapes me now.”

We ate for a while without speaking. A flat wave slid across the surface of the lake like a crumb-scraper.

“You were a cop?” He used the toast to mop the egg yolk off his plate.

“I took the oath. I never wore the uniform.”

“Detroit?” I nodded. He swallowed. “My brother was a Detroit cop. Left to join the marines in forty-three. Jap sub torpedoed his troop ship one day out of Pearl. He never made it to the fighting.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t you sent that fish.”

I finished my coffee. “How late in forty-three?”

“September.”

“Was he in Detroit in June?”

He watched me over his cup. “He was on duty during the riot. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

“He tell you anything?”

“I was his little brother. He told me everything. Including the stuff his watch commander told him not to tell. That’s why he quit. It wasn’t what he saw, exactly. It was what he saw and couldn’t talk about. Except to me.”

“What did he see?”

“Did you read
Paradise Valley?”

“I read the one you published. I heard enough of your dictation to want to know more about the one you didn’t.”

The rain came then. It started as a swishing in the pines to the west and swept our way in a straight line as if it were slung from a bucket. It smacked the awning and ran down it and over the edge, splattering the deck and completely blocking our view of the lake. We went inside just as lightning flared and a long cackle of thunder let go overhead. The old men at the big table were still drinking coffee and laughing at the same stories. A number of the other diners who had finished stood inside the entrance looking out at the hard rain and waiting for it to let up. The lights went down twice but stayed on.

“We’re in for some dark,” Booth said. “Last time I was here we were out for three days. No, I invited you.” Standing in front of the cash register he waved away my wallet and paid the bill. The hostess rang it up, hunching her shoulders at each snap of thunder.

I thought we were going to wait along with the others, but once he’d gotten his change and left a tip he turned up his collar, clutched it at his throat, put a hand on the doorknob, and leered at me. “Ready?”

I grabbed my collar and jerked my chin down in a John Wayne nod. We dashed out into the cold wash. It smelled of brimstone from the warm concrete.

We sprinted hard, but by the time we threw ourselves into the Plymouth’s deep front seat, hooting like drunken kids, we were soaked to the bone. The wipers couldn’t keep up with the downpour; they just smeared it over the windshield like glue. Waiting for it to slow down, Booth turned on the heater and let it warm up and then hit the blower to give us the illusion we were drying out. He was shivering, but when he caught me watching him he showed his teeth at me and winked. His was the generation that met everything, from a death in the family to a mortar blast at close range, with one eye closed.

When the curtain finally opened he tugged on the lights and swept the car into a tight U-turn in the middle of Main Street, heading back to the motel. He pressed down the accelerator as we straightened out and the car fishtailed. He let the wheel twirl through his fingers right, then left, then right again as he corrected. I couldn’t tell if he was a good driver because he was good or because he thought he was. It’s the kind of thing that can only be proven when you crash.

“Same drill,” he said as the neon fish leapt into view up ahead. “You fetch the ice, I’ll uncork the booze. Did you remember to turn off your radiator this morning?”

“I think I forgot.”

“I didn’t. First time I wished I had Alzheimer’s. We’ll meet in your cabin. I’m an old man. I talk better when I thaw out.”

14

F
or a long time I tried to be like my brother,” Booth said. “He was ten years older, a champion sprinter at Central High. He had two letters of commendation in his police jacket and was up for a medal of valor after the riot. He turned it down. That’s when I knew I had no hope.”

It was dark in my cabin. The power was out and although it was just past 9:00
A.M
. the window was black. When lightning streaked, the sky went platinum and I saw him sitting in the armchair with the hand holding his glass resting on the right arm. We had on dry clothes and the room was warm, but there was a damp smell that made me think of the tropics, where Duane Booth’s ship had gone down in September 1943.

I was sitting up in bed with pillows bunched in the small of my back. My glass was on the nightstand and we each had a bottle so neither of us would have to get up to refill. I was closer to keeping up with him now that there was something in my stomach and Cabin Five was empty. Booth had brought the entire case; I’d asked if he was moving in and he’d said he wasn’t sure about the roof in Four and wanted to keep his valuables handy throughout the crisis. I’d almost asked about the manuscript, but he was talking now at last and I didn’t want to take a chance and grind down the starter.

“The riot was the war’s worst blunder, and we had enough of those to lose the whole show if the enemy hadn’t had even more,” he said. “Ford and GM and Chrysler did what the government told them, put blacks next to whites from Kentucky and Tennessee and Mississippi and Georgia on the line for the first time and beefed up the security so there’d be no trouble in the defense plants; then when the whistle blew they threw open the doors and told them to go out and have fun. Half the police force was overseas, and what was left was too busy looking for Fifth-Column saboteurs to see how everyone else was getting along.

“It all busted loose on June twentieth, a Sunday. A gang of rednecks threw a Negro woman off the Belle Isle bridge, or maybe it was a gang of Negroes and a white woman; I don’t think they ever did sort that one out. Anyway, rumors spread fast in the heat. Streetcars got dumped over, black dives in Paradise Valley were set on fire, people on the street, black and white, were beaten and gang-raped and shot. By Monday night there were more than thirty dead, most of them Negroes. Took five thousand federal troops to put it down. About six weeks later a governor’s committee reported it was the blacks that started it. I think that’s when the term
whitewash
was coined.” He took a long draught. “Shit. Tastes like water. Let’s see. Duane was on duty the whole time, partnering Officer Roland Clifford. You’ve heard of him.”

“He’s the one hero both the white and black communities agree on. There’s talk of naming a street after him.”

“Hitler had a street too. I saved the clipping from the
News,
because Duane was mentioned. I threw it out finally, but I still know parts of it by heart: ‘Officer Roland R. Clifford of the Fifth Precinct was commended by the department for his heroic attempt to save three Negro defense workers from an agitated mob. With the aid of Officer Duane A. Booth, his partner, he stopped the Woodward Avenue streetcar at eight P.M. and removed the men, who were the only Negroes aboard, to give them safe conduct to their homes. On their way to the squad car, the two officers and their charges were intercepted by a mob of between twenty and thirty white males, who claimed that the three Negroes were responsible for an earlier atrocity and demanded that the accused parties be turned over to them for justice.’

“To hell with the journalese,” Booth said. “I said before I had my fill of it. Clifford drew his gun and held back the mob while Duane hustled the three men into the car. Before he could get the door shut, a rock flew out of the crowd and hit Clifford in the head. He went down and the mob poured in and beat the shit out of Duane. When he and Clifford came to they were alone. They found the three poor bastards they’d been trying to protect hanging from three lampposts in the next block.”

I drank whiskey and watched lightning bleach the inside of the cabin briefly. It made him look like a carved hunk of white marble.

“That’s how you wrote it in the book,” I said when he didn’t continue. “You described it just as if you’d seen it yourself.”

“No one saw it. That’s why it’s called fiction. I’m a better writer than anyone knows, me included. The way I wrote it, no one could believe it happened any other way. A year or so before Clifford died, the president came to Detroit and gave him a medal. He should’ve given me one, too. They won’t admit it now, and they sure wouldn’t have back when I wrote it, but that two-bit paperback made Roland Clifford. He’d have been forgotten along with all the other heroes who had the bad taste not to die when their names were in the headlines if
Paradise Valley
hadn’t sold six hundred thousand copies, mostly to horny little boys who got themselves off on the rape scenes. Is it my fault one of them grew up to be president?”

“You’re saying what you wrote wasn’t what happened.”

“You’re a detective. That you are.” He swallowed.

Rain clobbered the windowpane, the only sound. He’d either changed his mind about talking or had lost his train. I was about to introduce a new subject and work our way back when he went on. He’d fallen into the grating drone of the tapes.

“When I close my eyes I can still hear Duane telling it, just the way he told it to our mother and me in the dining room of the old place on Kercheval late that Monday night and never told it to anyone afterwards. Guess that’s why I don’t like closing my eyes for too long at a stretch. Everything happened just the way the papers said and the way I put it in the book, except for one detail. It wasn’t Clifford who got knocked cold. It was Duane Adam Booth, his partner. And it wasn’t a rock. It was the butt of Clifford’s service revolver. He used it when Duane went for his own to push back the crowd. The three poor bastards were dead when my brother woke up.”

“Clifford turned them over?”

“I doubt he wanted to. He was probably a bigot— everyone was, then—but he was no killer. He was just yellow, and a better mathematician than my brother. It was two against a couple of dozen and he turned coat to save his own skin; try translating
that
for the foreign market. Fortunately I didn’t have to worry about it. I wrote it straight from the official police report. The one Clifford filed and Duane signed.”

“Why? Start with Duane.”

“Why did he sign it? It wasn’t his first choice. He wrote a different report separately, then tore it up. His partner made it clear that if he went down, he wouldn’t go down alone. None of the members of the mob that lynched those men was going to come forward and back Duane up.”

“Still, it was just Clifford’s word against his.”

“Clifford had friends. He retired a full commander after twenty-five years with the department. Even a coward who gets to pose as a hero doesn’t rise that far on reputation alone. The reputation was useful, maybe crucial, but it would’ve blown over in a year without someone in a position to nail it down every time the promotions list went up.”

“City hall?”

“Don’t be naive. What’s city hall got to gain from a cop with gratitude? Who’s left? Think.”

“Oh, them.” I emptied my glass. “It always seems to come down to them no matter what.”

“The price of liberty is eternal corruption. Ask Russia.” Liquid splashed in the dark. “Duane wasn’t around to do it—he enlisted rather than spend the rest of his career telling the same old lie, then got killed—so I made Roland Clifford my hobby. For years I kept a scrapbook, starting with the riot piece.

“I don’t know even now if the boys in the tight jackets had their teeth into him from the start or if they smelled money and swam in later. Whatever else you say about them, you can’t say they don’t learn from their mistakes. They got rich from Prohibition, then blew most of their profits lobbying against Repeal. It took ten years to regain their momentum. Then came the wartime black market. They turned meat and eggs and cigarettes and tires into cash, tons of it, but they knew the war couldn’t last forever. When Roosevelt and Churchill met Stalin at Yalta, the Detroit boys held their own summit.”

He stopped to light a cigarette. Twin match-flares crawled on the lenses of his glasses. I almost jumped. In the dark I’d half convinced myself I was listening to his canned dictation.

“They drew up a plan to divert their gains into postwar rackets.” He shook out the flame. “Gambling, unions, prostitution, entertainment. They needed protection from the law, so they bought it. Clifford was a sergeant when the war ended. A week after V-J Day he was promoted to the plainclothes division. The city averaged a dozen raids per election year, complete with front-page pictures of cops loading whores into paddy wagons and smashing one-arm bandits and posing behind tables covered with betting slips and cash. Sergeant Clifford managed to appear in all of them. The amount of money confiscated barely covered the cost of the raids. The people who went to jail were strictly blue collar: pavement princesses and pugs, door openers. Nobody important. The cash registers were chiming again next weekend.”