A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (2 page)

“Your plane almost landed on it. This Booth character sounds like the Babe Ruth of risks.”

“It wasn’t as if I was counting on him to deliver a new manuscript. The contract was to reprint
Paradise Valley,
his best-known novel, with an option on three others if he sold through. Here.” She took her bag off the back of her chair, reached inside, and laid a squat glossy rectangle of cardboard and paper on my side of the table. It was almost square.

I picked it up. The aged paperback was dog-eared and the orange spine was cracked, but the cover still glistened beneath a coat of varnish. The scene painted on the front took place in a rumpled bedroom. A rough customer in a wrinkled trenchcoat and a fedora stood in the foreground in three-quarter profile with his broken nose showing. In the background, centered, a blonde crouched facing him in a scarlet slip with one strap dangling, threatening him with the jagged end of a shattered bottle. Behind her a window looked out on a street in flames and shadowy figures armed with rocks and clubs darting about in the flickering light. Fat yellow letters in upper- and lower-case spelled out
Paradise Valley
across the top. Eugene Booth’s name, much smaller, clung to the lower right-hand corner.

The edges of the pages were dyed yellow. The pages themselves were brown and brittle and covered with fine print. A great deal more money had gone into the lurid package than into the book itself. The copyright date was 1952. “Bloody Melee on the Streets of the Motor City!” read a blurb on the back. I held it out.

“You can keep it,” she said. “Collectors are paying as much as a hundred for it in good condition. Consider it a bonus if you take the job.”

I laid it aside. There was a chance I’d be giving it back at the end of the meal: Work and old friends, coal oil and Kool-Aid. “I think it’s one I read. Takes place during the race riot in forty-three.”

“We were planning to issue it in hardcover, on acid-free paper, with a jacket painting by a major African-American artist. It’s powerfully written, although salacious, and the macho posturing is unintentionally funny. Anyone bothering to reissue this kind of thing a couple of years ago would have been obliged to advertise it as a camp classic, and maybe sold five thousand copies, tops. Then the Library of America brought out a two-volume deluxe set of James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Horace McCoy—Booth’s peers—and pronounced it a national treasure. That was the beginning of the comeback.”

“If Booth skipped out
after
you signed him, why don’t you just go ahead and publish it?”

“That’s just it. He canceled the contract. He returned the advance check uncashed, along with this note.”

She handed me a trifold of cheap gray stock from her bag, creased and yellowed at the corners, with
THE ALAMO MOTEL
printed at the top. The brief paragraph had been typewritten in elite characters on an old machine whose keys needed realigning; the
a
and the
o
in particular had seceded nearly far enough to start their own typewriter.

Mrs. Starr:

Much as it sticks in an old hack’s craw to refuse a buck, I hope you’ll be kind enough to tear up our agreement. A gelding ought to know better than to try to breed.

Gene Booth

The signature was a thick scrawl in watery ink from a fountain pen.

I sniffed at the coarse paper. Bourbon. That was a nice touch. “Signature check out?”

“It matches the one on the contract, except for the nickname. He signed Eugene. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been strictly legal. I called the trailer park, and got a stranger who said he was the temporary manager. He said Booth quit last week and moved out. I looked up the Alamo Motel—it’s on Jefferson Avenue—but nobody I spoke to there had ever heard of him. They didn’t have a registration card in that name.”

“The Alamo’s a rathole. I doubt it has its own stationery these days. This sheet is older than you are. What about the envelope?”

“Plain drugstore, no return address. Detroit postmark. Should I have brought it?”

“You just told me everything it would have.” I read the note again. “ ‘A gelding ought to know better than to try to breed.’ What do you think that means?”

“A number of things, none of them very cheerful. He must be a wretched man.”

I folded the note along its creases and stuck it into the paperback like a bookmark. “Photo? Description?”

“We never met. We did everything by telephone and the mail. I had plans to set up a publicity shoot in a month or so. I couldn’t even find an old picture on the Internet. He seems to have been allergic to cameras.”

“He might have a record.”

“He might. It wouldn’t shock me. Many of those PBO writers were odd ducks, misanthropes and misfits. They rode the rails, picked lettuce, bellhopped, went to war and were changed by it; some of them served time on chain gangs. The stuff they wrote was too raw for the cloth trade. They got away with more in paper because that whole industry wasn’t respectable to begin with. That’s why they’re so popular now. The rest of society has caught up with them.”

I jingled the ice in my glass. “Even if I find him he won’t want to come back.”

“Finding him is only half the job. I want you to learn why he backed out. If I know what the problem is, maybe I can help fix it.”

“You do want a psychiatrist.”

She finished her Bacardi and touched her lower lip with a little finger. The lacquered nail was rounded to accommodate a computer keyboard. “I admit I thought of you because of the Detroit connection. But you’re perfect for this job. You’re the kind of detective Booth wrote about; the kind they say doesn’t exist in real life. He’s sure to see that. If you can get him to trust you, you can find out what’s wrong. I’m sure of it.”

“Two Model T’s chasing each other on the Information Superhighway,” I said. “Talk about your photo ops.”

“It’s not a publicity stunt, Amos. I need Booth.” One hand gripped the other on the table, the knuckles pale against the tan. “My severance package and 401K went into the rent on the office suite. I floated a loan to cover the advances I paid out. I turn forty again this year. I’m too old to go back and start from the bottom.”

“I heard your joints creaking all the way from the street.”

She said nothing.

I picked up
Paradise Valley
and looked at it again, front and back. It didn’t mean anything to me beyond an interesting read. I slid it and Booth’s note into my inside breast pocket. It had been a long time since a paperback had fit there. They were coming much thicker now, and cost twenty times more.

Louise knew what the gesture meant. She smiled, unfolded her hands, and got the waiter’s attention. He brought menus bound in aubergine suede.

“We are offering a summer special on barbecued spareribs,” he said.

I said, “It isn’t summer.”

“I’m aware of that, sir. Our chef is under the influence of the weather.”

Louise handed back her menu. “I’ll have the ribs.”

I ordered the London Broil. When the ribs came, charred at the ends and drenched in rust-colored sauce, I said, “You shouldn’t have worn white.”

“That’s what my ex-husband said.” Her smile turned wicked. She shrugged out of the jacket, rolled up her sleeves, and tucked her linen napkin into her collar. She polished off half a rack with her fingers and never got a spot on her. Some people are like that. I can’t walk past an Italian restaurant without ruining a good necktie.

2

W
hen the waiter took her credit card, Louise asked him to call for a cab. I offered to drop her off at her hotel. She shook her head.

“I’d rather you got to work right away. Anyway, I’m staying with a friend in Hazel Park. I’ll be there through the end of next week.” She gave me the telephone number.

I wrote it down and got up to help her with her jacket. “Old friend?”

“Too young to be old. She’s the local sales representative for my former place of employment. I mean to steal her as soon as I can afford to hire sales reps.” She smiled. “Did you think it was a man?”

“Does it matter what I think?”

She studied me for a long moment. Then she shook her head again and slung her bag over her shoulder. “Oh, no. I’ve edited Washington politicians whose faces I could read easier.”

“I’m a riddle wrapped in a mystery with a crunchy almond center.” I went out with her to the canopy to wait for the cab.

When a caved-in Black-and-White took her away, leaking exhaust out of everything but its tailpipe, I went for a stroll. I had some research to do, but it was too nice a day to go straight back to the office. I headed up Woodward with the sun on my back, smelling the concrete heating up and feeling the Beastie Boys in my feet from the monster speakers in the back of every third car that passed me. The odd convertible top was down, fluorescent-pale legs stuck out of short pants that had lain in drawers since September, and everywhere I looked the city of Detroit was beginning to creep out of its horned winter shell; but not so far that it couldn’t shrink back in at the first sign of a rogue snowflake.

In Grand Circus Park I found a section of bench the pigeons hadn’t targeted, took off my coat, and sat down, stretching out my legs and pressing my shoulders against the dry weathered wood of the slats. I slipped the old paperback out of the coat and opened it. Five or six pages would give me the writing style, and through it a glimpse of the writer.

I’d read ten chapters when a shelf of steely cloud slid in front of the sun and touched my face with its metallic shadow. It was the story of Roland Clifford, a white Detroit beat cop badly injured while trying to protect three Negro defense-plant workers from a racist mob during the riot that swept the city in June 1943. The blurb on the back cover announced that the narrative was based on fact, but no straight journalism I had read about the incident approached the visceral power of Eugene Booth’s unadorned fiction. The sentences were lean and angular, as if they’d been scratched onto the page with a needle, and the story moved along as if it had been prodded by the sharp tip.

When I’d sat down, I had shared the park with a woman and two children and a number of downtown office workers in their shirtsleeves, eating sandwiches from greasy paper sacks and reading on the grass. Now I was alone. I marked my place with Booth’s note and walked back to the lot where I’d left my car. The wind had shifted from Windsor, cold off the river. I didn’t pass a single pair of shorts on the way.

I’d had a green spring. A lawyer representing a local trucking firm had retained me to collect affidavits from witnesses to an accident involving one of its drivers in Indiana, a college basketball coach whose wife had walked out with their joint savings account hired me to bring back the wife or the money, or just the money if I couldn’t do both, and a computer software store where I’d worked undercover ten days on a case of employee theft had decided to pay me for the month they thought it would take me to stop the bleeding. That and the lawyer’s retainer and a few other jobs made up for getting stiffed when I told the basketball coach his wife had earned every penny for sticking past the honeymoon. He clipped me in the mouth in lieu of paying, and got a receipt in the form of a dislocated jaw.

The money went into a crown, the retirement fund, a bottle of good Scotch, new magazines for the waiting room, and the Olds Cutlass, which now had a rebuilt carburetor and stainless steel pipes, handily disguised by dents and chalky paint. I use it to nudge supermarket carts out of parking spaces and blow off troopers on the interstate.

I didn’t need Louise Starr’s job. Only half of it was my specialty—the missing persons half—and anyway I’d been thinking of driving up to the Upper Peninsula for a couple of weeks to look up an old cop acquaintance who liked to fish, and let my beard grow. I could always start another retirement fund. She’d figured that might happen, and that was why she’d come in person. It’s much easier to say no over the telephone, without the violet eyes and the foxglove.

I had a customer outside the office reading that month’s
Forbes,
but it was a divorce case. I told him to try the marriage counselor on the fourth floor. It’s a three-story building. When he left I unlocked the door to the inner chamber, pried up the window to let out the trapped heat, oiled the old nickel-and-iron fan for later, and sat down behind the desk to burn some offerings on the altar of the god of standard operating procedure.

Louise’s information was a pale carbon of a rough sketch done from someone’s faulty memory. Eugene Booth had married once, in 1954, and been widowed within two years, no children. He had been honorably discharged from the U.S. Army at the end of the Korean War and had outlived his parents and his only sibling, a brother named Duane. He had worked for a number of newspapers before his books sold and held down a slew of odd jobs, emphasis on
odd:
sparring partner, hardware clerk, chainsaw salesman, slaughterhouse worker, florist, mortuary attendant, volunteer fireman, grease monkey, floorwalker, apprentice exterminator. I could have gotten most of that off the back of one of his books. For an update I called my contact in the Michigan Secretary of State’s office, who brought up a recent driver’s license for Booth comma Eugene comma No Middle, in five minutes, complete with picture. He said he’d messenger it over. I said I’d money him later. Armed with an official description I called all the area hospitals, starting with the VA, and determined that no septuagenarian white male of Booth’s height and weight and coloring had been admitted under that name or any other within the past week. The singsong Indian voice I got at the Wayne County Morgue looked under all the sheets and reported the same thing. All the John Does were either too young or too black.

Booth’s Social Security and army pension checks went to a post office box in Belleville. The next ones weren’t due until the first of June.

It was getting chilly in the office. The building superintendent had switched off the furnace on May 15 and wouldn’t turn it on again before November. I leaned the window shut and sat back down and read three more chapters of Booth’s book, but the bloody business in the old black area of town known as Paradise Valley just made me restless. I put it back in my pocket, got my car out of the best space I’d had since someone bought the abandoned service station across the street, and made a research trip to John King Used & Rare Books.