A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (22 page)

No one was waiting to throw money at me in the reception room and the mail hadn’t come yet, but the cops were at work. My answering service told me Mary Ann Thaler had called. I couldn’t get her on the extension so I called the switchboard, worked my way down the menu and up through a sergeant at the desk and a detective third grade to a detective sergeant named Richman who said Lieutenant Thaler was away from her desk. I left my name and rang off. The whole thing had taken just twice as long as it had before they’d updated the system.

The telephone rang as soon as I took my hand off the receiver. It was Thaler.

“You sound like Monday morning,” she said. “Big weekend?”

“Bigger than both of us. How was yours?”

“It was a weekend. They come around every sixth day, no surprise. Life’s short enough without blowing it away in five-day increments waiting for Saturday.”

“Did your laundry, right? Run out of quarters?”

“I send out my laundry. I don’t cook either if I can help it. I’m not the girl of your dreams, Walker. I’m also not the policeman of your dreams. I heard back from my friend in the Big Apple. Those plates you saw at Black Lake don’t belong to a GMC pickup. They’re registered to a five-year-old Ford Escort, and they were reported stolen in Manhattan a week ago.”

“I’d have been disappointed in him if they weren’t. The pickup was probably hot too.”

“Undoubtedly.” There was a short silence. “Got pretty chummy with him on two minutes’ acquaintance, did you?”

I’d speared a Winston between my lips. I struck the match at a bad angle and burned my fingers. I got rid of it and blew on them. My brain was still soft on one side. The man in Cabin Five was still Robert C. Brown to her, a guy in sunglasses and a Yankees cap. If this kept up I was going to have to hire someone to edit an A. Walker Investigations newsletter to help me keep my half-truths straight.

“I’m talking about a basic human type,” I said. “They learned to hunt by pack rules.”

Someone trundled a metal file drawer shut on her end. It was a warm morning; the door to her office would be open to circulate air. “Where were you yesterday, Walker? I tried your home phone all day. One of my nines looked like a seven and I wanted to make sure I got the plate number right. I had to read it out both ways. It hadn’t been assigned with a seven in that spot so we were all right, but it was a headache I didn’t need.”

“I went to a movie.” I told her which one. I stopped before I told her what theater. People who are establishing alibis are full of such helpful information.

“All night too? I tried you at nine-thirty and eleven, let it ring ten times.”

“I was asleep, working on a stiff neck.”

“The movie must have taken a lot out of you. Was there a cartoon?”

“If you were lonely you should have called your inspector friend. I don’t wear this office home.”

“Since when?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “So you got laid. Congratulations. The blonde lady editor with the stick up her skirt, no doubt. You could have said something up front without naming names. Why do you figure you have to lock everything up? You live your life like a suspicious person.”

“I’ve been reading too many paperback mysteries.” I cracked another match. This time I got the tobacco going without personal injury.

“I’ll tell you how I spent
my
Sunday,” she said. “When I wasn’t trying to get you on the line, I was thinking about Allison Booth.”

“What did you think up?”

“Nothing worth bringing to court. I never owned a pair of black lace panties until I was twenty-five. Would you care to know why?”

“If you care, I care.” She wasn’t the kind who locked things up.

“It was something my mother told me. ‘Never wear black lace panties, because if you get in an accident the doctors will think you’re a tramp and they won’t work as hard to save your life.’ What’s that say to you?”

“Right off the bat it says your mother never dated a doctor.”

“My mother is an angel and it’s not your privilege to soil her good name. She taped my first police-range qualifying target on her refrigerator. What it says is nice girls finish first and bad girls are just finished. Or were, when my mother was a girl and Allison Booth got stabbed full of holes and two cops named Saunders and O’Hara went through the motions of looking for her killer and hung them up as soon as their first suspect went sour. All because the night someone stuffed her into a window well she met a man outside Hudson’s who was not her husband. I’m not reopening this case to get a promotion. I’m doing it for all the women who want to wear black lace panties even if nobody ever gets to see them.”

“Are you wearing them right now?”

“Go directly to hell. What’s on the list today?”

“Lowell Birdsall was out of town yesterday. I want to ask him if he knew the cops liked his father for the Booth murder in the beginning. He might not have known, but I want to be looking at him when he tells me. If he says he knew I want to ask why it didn’t come up the first time we spoke.”

“I’ll go with you. I’ll be Tweedledee.”

“Why should you be Tweedledee? You’re badge-carrying fuzz.”

“I’m also a girl. He’ll expect me to be the one who offers him a warm cup of tea and my pillowy bosom. You’re the ape who wants to tie him around a banister.”

“You don’t have a pillowy bosom. And I thought you girls didn’t like to be called girls.”

“Nobody asked my opinion when the subject came up. If they had I’d have convinced them it’s one weapon we should never trade away.”

“You’re making sweeping assumptions about Birdsall’s experience of the opposite sex. Don’t forget, he grew up on a steady diet of hardboiled dames and vixens in black sable. Also he’s a big muscular baldy. That’s just the type that runs toward women who buy dog collars by the gross even though they live in apartments where pets aren’t allowed. If you confuse him he’ll clam up.”

“Okay, I’ll be Tweedledum. Just don’t tell the inspector. He thinks I’m demure.”

“You cops have no ambition. The trunk’s full of tricks but you’re too lazy to dig down.”

“So dig. I’m a quick study.”

“I’m swimming solo on this one,” I said. “It will be less awkward if you don’t ask me why.”

“Why?”

I stubbed out the butt. “Because you’re an officer of the court, and you won’t have to answer so many embarrassing questions if you don’t see me hang him out a fourth-floor window by his shoelaces.”

“Do you think four floors are enough?”

“It’s all I’ve got to work with at the Alamo. You need to pay me out some line, Lieutenant. I’ll never hear the end of it if you wind up walking the halls of the Hotel Nobody Gives a Shit talking to yourself on a Motorola.”

“Such language in front of a lady. You did have a tough night.”

“I’m sorry.”

When she laughed, genuinely laughed, she did sound like a girl. “Cheer up, Walker. Jitterbug’s back and so will you be, someday. Just don’t hand me that bull about my career. You want to cowboy the job.”

“That’s the second time in two days somebody’s called me a cowboy. I can’t think why. I don’t know a fetlock from a Yale.”

“It was an observation, not a criticism. I gave up trying to corrige the incorrigible when I passed the L.T.’s exam.”

“Tell that to Allison Booth.” I looked at the fan to make sure the blades were still turning. They didn’t seem to be stirring any air. “You know, you can’t answer all the lost voices. If you start trying, in the end you won’t be able to answer even one.”

“That sounds like a pep talk you give yourself.”

“Another lost voice.”

A swivel chair squeaked on its rocker. “Just tell me what you found out when you find it out, okay? Forty-year-old police business is still police business. And you need to do downtown a favor. It’s been a while. You don’t call, you don’t write. Next time you need the latchstring left out, Mama might not be home.” She hung up.

24

T
he talk with Lieutenant Thaler made me change the order of things. I try not to lie to women. I dug out Lowell Birdsall’s business card and dialed his number at the Alamo. His machine played five seconds of sirens and machine guns—a scratchy old transcription from
Gangbusters
—then an announcement that sounded like Jeanette MacDonald doing an impression of Humphrey Bogart, asking me to leave a message. I didn’t leave one.

My watch read a couple of minutes past nine. He might have been sleeping in after the trip back from Cleveland. It was all of a two-hour drive, but for a man who worked out of his apartment it would seem like the Bataan Death March. Anyway it freed me up to go back to my original plan.

Grand River Avenue extends most of the way across Michigan. If you don’t like expressways and don’t mind traffic lights and construction delays and can avoid the occasional stygian detour, you can drive from downtown Detroit almost into Lake Michigan without ever using a turn signal; but you’d need a week to spare to get the thing done. Fortunately I needed less than fifteen minutes, because Russell Fearing and I worked in the same ZIP code.

I’d probably driven past the building a couple of hundred times and hadn’t noticed it. A dozen blocks west of the little pocket canyon of skyscrapers in the heart of the business district, it stood a story high and a block long, built of white-painted cinderblock, and contained a half-dozen businesses separated by interior partitions. A beauty school operated out of one end with its name in white on a blue plastic awning over a display window with wigs on Styrofoam heads inside, while a store that sold plumbing fixtures advertised a sale on flush valves on a sandwich board on the other end, the sign holding open the door to offer the throngs easy access. Accordioned between were a hearing-aid shop, a Christian Science reading room next to a medical supply outlet, and
RUSSELL FEARING SECURITY SERVICES
lettered in tasteful gold on a glass door that sparkled from polishing. Only when you parked in the cramped lot and stood in front of the door could you read
R. I. Fearing, U.S. Secret Service, Ret’d,
etched in one corner.

A pleasant little buzzer sounded when I pushed open the door. The reception room was a perfect square, carpeted in silver-blue pile, with soundproof navy panels on the walls and four white scoop chairs cornered around a glass table containing the usual magazines. In the corner opposite sat a woman of about sixty, sitting straight-backed before a small computer screen. She wore her gray hair short in back and swept into a Woody Woodpecker crest in front and glasses with heavy black frames. She hadn’t an ounce of fat on her. She had on a red blazer with black patches on the lapels and a white silk riding-stock around her throat, and when she looked up alertly and asked if she could help me, I wasn’t surprised to hear a Mayfair accent.

“Fearing,” I said. In the right mood there is something about Merrie Olde England that brings out the Detroit in me.

“He’s in a meeting at the moment. Is he expecting you, Mister—?”

“Drummond. You can call me Bulldog.” I twisted the knob on the door at the rear marked
PRIVATE
and went on through. She squeaked and got up to stop me, but there’s never any sincerity in that. They teach elementary physics even in British public schools.

Fearing’s office wasn’t any bigger than the waiting room, and less comfortable. There were no seats for visitors, only a plain chunk of desk holding up desk stuff and the man himself sitting behind it in his shirtsleeves holding a slim black telephone receiver. There was a color photo framed on one wall of a younger, less bulky Fearing shaking hands with Gerald Ford and a glass case mounted on the wall adjacent with a Remington pump shotgun and a teargas gun with a wire barrel in racks and a number of revolvers and automatic pistols on pegs. It had a large round brass lock and the glass was gridded with alarm wires. Aside from those things there was no decoration, not even a window. The carpet and walls were the same as in the other room, as if whoever decorated the place had not bothered to draw a line between public first impression and personal privacy. Fearing had made all the decisions himself and hadn’t taken five minutes doing it.

He looked up at me with those hard sad eyes in that nut-brown face, as surprised as a turtle at the dawn, and said, “I’ll call you back, Mr. Ford.” He placed the receiver on its shallow standard and looked at the woman vibrating in the doorway behind me.

“He just walked right in, Mr. Fearing. Should I call the police?”

“No. That would be poor advertising. Leave us, please. I know this fellow. He answers to Tom Mix.”

“Tom Mix?”

The tight smile tugged at the corners of his mouth and gave up. “Well, Errol Flynn.” “Robin Hood?”

“I was thinking of
Virginia City.
The one where he was a cowboy?”

“You Americans and your westerns. You’d think the frontier never closed. Even we Brits let go of the Empire finally.” The door banged shut.

Fearing said, “You should put some steak on that eye.”

“That’s an old myth. Anyway, T-bones are six bucks a pound. I thought you bodyguard types never bothered with the face. Too hard on the hands when an undercut to the stomach’s just as good.”

“That’s true. Are you telling me you were hit by a bodyguard? Just how many celebrities did you harass over the weekend?”

“One seemed to do the trick. How often do you eat at the Blue Heron?”

“Twice in the last four years. I was working both times. Am I being accused of something?” He sat with his palms up on the desk, a gesture of wary submission known only to certain related fields of endeavor. It added a split-second to one’s fast draw—unless he had a spring rig up a sleeve. The French cuffs of his white shirt looked pretty snug for that. I let a little of the tension out of my shoulders; about enough to add a split-second to my fast draw. I’d come armed.

“Your client Eddie Cypress asked me to lunch yesterday. Two men I never got a good look at pinned me with my own car door and played a fast game of hacky-sack with my head. They left these behind.” I slid my left hand into my side pocket and laid the twisted and smashed pair of glasses on his desk.