A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (18 page)

I patted hers and sat back. “I’ll do it for the money.”

Nothing changed in her face. Everything else had. She opened her purse and drew out a checkbook bound in gray suede leather.

“I’ll pay you what I owe so far, along with three days’ advance based on the new terms,” she said, uncapping a silver pen. “That should cover your expenses until you know something definite.”

“Just make it out for the fifteen hundred I’ve earned.I’ll bill you at the other end, the old fee, and I’ll hold you to the bonus, just to keep it interesting. The cops get suspicious when a private star butts in on an open case for nothing but his health. I want to see this out.”

She regarded me. Then she shook her head and began writing. “I can’t make up my mind whether you’re the shrewdest man I ever met or the most ridiculous. Perhaps that’s how you survive.”

“It sure isn’t my diet.” I drank the rest of my Scotch.

She handed me the check and stood. Her gaze fell to the copy of the
Free Press
folded on the corner of the desk. “I forgot to mention I’m not your only out-of-town visitor this week. I see Glad Eddie Cypress is coming to sign his book.”

“I thought you turned him down.”

“My boss didn’t. The book’s number three on the
Times
list. Eddie’s doing a twenty-city tour.” She unfolded the paper and touched a corner article with a clear glossy nail.

It was a publisher’s handout about the Mafia hitman-turned-government witness and his appearance that coming Sunday at Borders Books in Birmingham, with a picture of Cypress smiling with pen in hand. The smile caught my eye, possibly because it was the last thing some fifteen people had seen when he had been holding something else. When I covered the top half of his face with my hand I recognized it myself. He looked older without the Yankees cap and dark glasses.

19

I
didn’t tell Louise about Glad Eddie. It would have led to more questions I couldn’t answer, and I had enough of those already to qualify for associate membership in the Detroit local of the philosophers’ union. When she was gone, leaving behind that faint trace of foxglove, I switched off the fan and locked up.

I drove home through the chalky half-tone of early dusk, stopping only for a sandwich and a cup of coffee at a place on Warren that was got up like an old-time diner in hopes of snaring the casino trade; only the casinos had run into a legal snag and the whites of desperation showed in the eyes of the proprietor behind the counter as he filled the orders of half a dozen customers scattered like coins in a beggar’s hat. The sandwich was good and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but I didn’t finish it. I kept thinking that my last meal had been steak-and-eggs with Eugene Booth.

TV had nothing better to offer than three sitcoms about young divorced mothers of small precocious children and an hour-long drama about lawyers. I’d brought in the package that had come for me at the Angler’s Inn and I broke it open and admired Lowell Birdsall’s cover, a study in reds and yellows of a bent-nosed brute grappling with a blonde in a fringed taxi-dancer’s dress on a ballroom floor ringed with human apes in deep shadow. But I wasn’t in the mood for Booth’s prose and laid down
Some of My Best Friends Are Killers
halfway through the first short chapter.

I lit a cigarette and put it out. I poured myself a drink and abandoned it after one sip. I couldn’t seem to stick with anything. I thought about going to bed. Although my eyes were burning and my shoulder blades stung from the long drive south I saw nothing in front of me but a night of rolling out the lumps in my mattress. So I did what I always did when I didn’t feel like thinking. I called Barry Stackpole.

“Hello, Amos.” He sounded bright and youthful. People who spend all their time stewing over blowtorch murders generally do.

I hesitated. “So you caved in and got Caller ID. I guess that makes me the last Mohican.”

“I didn’t neither. The people who place the threatening calls I have to worry about are smart enough to dial star sixty-seven first. Only two people have this number and the other one’s on Death Row in Texas.” Ice tinkled on his end. He swallowed. “You sound like you’re in the next cell. Divorce business getting too lively?”

“Go to hell. I drove four hours today on top of a police interrogation.”

“Well, the drive is new. Which police, Chicago?”

“Cheboygan County.”

“You’re kidding. They got law up there now? I thought everybody settled their differences with dueling pistols.”

“No, that’s Detroit. I ran into someone you might know.”

“If it was in Cheboygan County he must have been floating facedown in a lake.”

“Why a lake?” Barry had been working on developing a sixth sense for as long as I’d known him.

“Nobody goes north in Michigan for the culture. Take away the lakes and you might as well be in Nebraska. Was I right about the floater?”

“No, this one’s still alive and doing a good job of it. Cypress is the name.”

Ice tinkled and clanked, but this time he didn’t drink. “That cocksucker.” It was barely audible.

“So you know him.”

“I haven’t had the pleasure. I haven’t had the plague either, but I know enough not to make pets of strange rats.”

“Your sense of humor’s wearing thin,” I said. “You make your living reporting on the comings and goings of rats like Glad Eddie.”

“If you can call cable TV a living. I get along with goons just fine. You ought to see the Christmas cards I get from Sing Sing and San Quentin. They skim a little, burn down buildings for the insurance, and occasionally beat some poor schmo to death with a baseball bat for missing one too many loan payments. They get caught or they don’t, do the time or they don’t, rat each other out for immunity or a plea to a lesser charge. But so far only one of them’s slid out from under fifteen contract murders and wheeled and dealed it into his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If I got a Christmas card from him I’d shove it up his ass with a bayonet. What’s a fuck like him doing up in the pines?”

“That was yesterday. Sunday he’s in Detroit. Well, Birmingham. He’s schlepping a book.”

“I heard. I hope it goes big and he celebrates with vodka and Valium.”

“Twelve hours after I saw him at Black Lake the man staying in the motel cabin next to his strangled to death with his own belt. Are you interested?”

The silence on his end was just long enough to register. “Your place or mine?”

“Are you drinking?”

“I jumped off the wagon to make a deadline. I can cab it over if you’re beat.”

“Do that.”

“Haig and Haig?”

“Chivas.”

“Barbarian. Be there in twenty.”

A Checker delivered him at the front door. He paused for a quick handshake, then strode in fast, the way he always did when in his current condition, to keep the effects of the alcohol from catching up. They showed only in the metallic brightness of his eyes and a minor limp. When he was granite sober, an orthopedic surgeon couldn’t tell which leg was artificial. The white cotton gloves he wore to disguise his two missing fingers gave him the air of a country club gentleman, an image he could carry off when it suited him, although he was just as comfortable in the company of Hell’s Angels and guys named Vinnie the Aardvark.

Considering the hours he keeps and the circles he travels in, Barry should look ten years older than he is. He’s my age and could pass for a college senior. Tonight I wondered if the hairdressers at the cable station where he kept weekly on-air tabs on the underworld elite might be responsible for the absence of gray in his sandy temples, but he had the complexion of a kid at church camp.

He glanced around at the living room, made no comment—the place hadn’t changed since his last visit, and anyway he’d spent three years sleeping in roach motels and underground garages after a bomb in his car failed to carry away more than a quarter of his anatomy—and flung himself into the only completely comfortable chair I owned. He had on an orange sweater, windowpane-plaid slacks, and well-worn moccasins with pink socks. “Pour,” he said.

I’d brought in an extra glass from the kitchen, filled it, and handed it to him. “Where’s Veronica and Jug-head?”

“What, the outfit? I met my prospective father-in-law today. He thinks this is how they dress at Harvard.”

“Who’s the lucky mafiosa?” I topped off the drink I’d been nursing for a half hour and sat on the sofa.

“Cynic.” He drank and screwed up his face. Then he lifted his brows. “It
is
Chivas. I thought maybe you’d saved the bottle. Stuff still tastes like iodine. The bride-to-be’s name is Tatyana, and she’s the prettiest little linebacker you’ve ever seen in a size fifteen.”

“Russian mob?”

“Ukrainian. Her old man’s silent partner in a couple of Indian casinos up north. He’s got his eye on Detroit. That’s the deadline I’m working on. Gaming Commission decides on his partner’s license application first of next month.”

“June wedding?”

He nodded with his eyes closed. The steel plate in his skull gave him migraines. “If the commission postpones I may have to ask you to be my best man.”

“Ever consider an easier line of work?”

“Back at you. At least the food’s good at an eastern European wedding. And they don’t serve Scotch.” He put his down, but not before helping himself to another sip. “Well, well. Glad Eddie Cypress. As I live and breathe. Which is not an expression he’d be used to hearing. I read his book.”

“Already? It’s just out.”

“His publisher sent me an advance copy. I guess you didn’t catch my review. I blew it to pieces with the sawed-off shotgun the boys in ATF took out of Joey Grenada’s place on Lake Michigan last summer. I can’t wait to see if they quoted that on the dust jacket.”

“Eddie got under your skin.”

“It’s the country I ought to be mad at. We gave Capone his day, but then we put him in jail. You and I must have been in Cambodia the week someone decided it was supposed to go the other way around. But you can’t fight the country, so I’ll just go ahead and hate Cypress. You know why they call him Glad Eddie? It’s not because of that shit-eating grin of his.”

“I thought it was.”

“They call him that because every time he completed a contract he sent a tasteful bouquet of gladiolus to the funeral. It was in the way of submitting a statement to his customers for services rendered. You can’t accuse him of being a piker; some of those hits took place out of season. But I imagine he deducted his florist’s bill from his taxes as a business expense. I can’t help wondering what went through the widows’ minds when those bouquets showed up.”

“His testimony sent a don to prison.”

“For putting out a single contract. The feds thought swinging a conviction was worth forgiving more murders than Jack the Ripper committed. But let’s not kid ourselves. Washington and Quantico don’t care about killings. Murder isn’t in their jurisdiction. Paul Lippo was costing them too much in uncollected taxes and all the accountants on their payroll couldn’t uncover a paper trail to save them. So they dug up Eddie and got him to corroborate a couple of wiretaps and let him walk without so much as a Hail Mary. And the gladiolus on fifteen graves are doing splendidly.”

“What else can you tell me about him?”

“First tell me about Black Lake.”

I rolled my glass between my palms. “I don’t want to turn on my TV tomorrow and see it.”

“You won’t. You don’t have a cable box. You won’t anyway. Not until you give me the high sign. How long have we known each other?”

“Don’t go there, Barry. You won’t like the ride.” I drank.

He looked at me blandly, his fake leg slung over one arm of his chair. “Okay. I’m off the air until this Ukrainian thing breaks anyway. My future father-in-law might tune in and find out I’m not a Harvard man. How’s that?”

“Better.” I told him the Black Lake part; more than I’d told Lieutenant Thaler but less than I’d told Louise Starr, and he didn’t have to know the name of the client. I left out Lowell Birdsall and Fleta Skirrett. Their connection with Allison Booth’s death fell outside Barry’s area of expertise.

“I read Eugene Booth when I was a kid,” he said. “Dynamite style, but he had the establishment sitting on his face like a fat dominatrix. I never bought Roland Clifford as a saint. My old man sold cut-rate suits out of a second-floor joint on Clairmount in forty-three. He didn’t see any heroes that weekend. Not in uniform. I wrote a piece on the riot when I was with the
Free Press,
but my editor spiked it. Too one-sided, he said. He was right. The only people who would talk to me were the blacks who survived it. The whites all had bad consciences and even the police officers who were retired were afraid of losing their pensions. Freedom of Information only bought me the runaround. The files were always in some other precinct. Bad karma. But you can’t publish that without a source.”

“So much for Barry Stackpole’s autobiography.”

“Twenty-three ninety-five will buy you Eddie’s, complete with his signature. I can’t add much, just everything that counts. He got ten of his notches the old-fashioned way, two soft-nose slugs in the back of the head close up, which says a lot more for his bedside manner than his marksmanship. He’s a charming fucker. He garroted three others, which is the
really
old-fashioned way, if you’re up on your Sicilian history. He favors nylon fishing line, fifty-pound test.”

“He said his old man was a fisherman.”

“His old man was a shark, which is as close as he ever got to a fish. Genovese mob gunned him when they moved in on the loan action in Manhattan mid-town. Eddie wouldn’t tell you that if he was incognito.”

“That was just an impression. He had on a cap and sunglasses in his cabin and he was disguising his voice.”

“All the more reason his former bosses wouldn’t tag him for a quiet hit in a jerkwater town in northern Michigan. He’s not your boy.”

“Then why was he carrying?”

“You didn’t see a gun.” He broke into a grin when I looked at him. “Okay, okay. It just doesn’t make sense they’d use a high-profile character like him and then have him go through all the trouble to make it look like suicide. And copping Booth’s manuscript. I mean, come on.”