A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (23 page)

He looked at them without touching. “Did you check the prescription?”

“I don’t have to prove anything in court. When I find Sargent Hurley I’ll try them on him, just like Cinderella. Then I’ll turn him into a pumpkin.”

“You said they pinned you with the car door?”

“They cracked a couple of ribs doing it, but I’m not beefing about that. I need my head to hold up my hat.”

“You’re not wearing a hat.”

“I’m keeping my options open.”

“Get them taped up?”

I shook my head.

“Right. Why pay the AMA by the yard? Either way they knit. Well, that explains why they hit you in the face. The door was in the way. You must have made Glad Eddie pretty sore at the bookstore. I’m sorry I was stuck outside. It would’ve been worth getting fired off the job to see you wipe the smile off his face.”

“I didn’t. It’s nailed on. What’s the matter, didn’t his check clear?”

He sat back then and smoothed down his necktie. It was clipped to his shirt with a gold clasp bearing the Secret Service seal. He folded his hands across his flat middle.

“I’m a gentleman so far,” he said. “You bust in, frighten my assistant, accuse me of a Class-A violation of the civil code, and I don’t raise my voice. One thing the service teaches you is patience, along with every home remedy ever invented to cure piles. But the cures don’t all work, and right now nobody’s paying me to be patient. I took a call from New York saying a celebrated author was coming to town and his security needed an extra man at the door. I didn’t hire on for any other kind of work, and I wasn’t asked, then or yesterday. I’d heard of Cypress, but I hadn’t thought anything about him either way: What business is it of mine how many mob lowlifes he stamped out or how much legit money he gets paid for writing about it? We’ve got presidential advisors advising the president to accept campaign money from the enemies of our country and cashing their government paychecks in the same bars in Washington where I used to cash mine. Okay, I don’t like him when I meet him. If I only worked for people I liked, I’d be buying my ammo with food stamps. I put up with what I have to put up with to pay my overhead. That doesn’t include putting up with characters like you. It doesn’t cost me a penny to show characters like you the door at forty miles an hour.”

I looked at his boxer’s face, the thick skin on his cheeks and the hard sad eyes made for looking up from under with his head sunk into his shoulders like a turtle’s, and I relaxed. It would have been a sin to put a hole through an arrangement like his, and my draw might not have been fast enough anyway. The fisted black combination butt of what would be a short-barreled revolver stuck out of a holster behind his right hipbone.

“ ‘R. I. Fearing,’ ” I said. “What’s the
I
stand for?”

This time he let the smile run out a little before taking in the hitch. “Icarus. My old man could barely read and write his own name, but he was a nut on the classics. So now you’ve got three names for me and I’ve got none for you.”

“Amos Walker. My old man named me after half a radio show.”

“You’re way too white for either half. Is that private cop I smell?”

“I’m going to have to buy a better brand of soap.”

“Wouldn’t help. It’s the way you hold your head and how you let your right hand hang open and the questions you ask that don’t count, like a polygraph expert getting a level. You’re not a cop or I’d have seen a shield before this. Given the choice between his metal and pictures of his grandkids, a cop will go for the metal every time.”

“Sweet.”

“Reflex. After fifteen years in Washington I can’t see a kid licking an ice cream cone without looking for a wire running from the cone to his shortpants pocket. It’s ruined me for Norman Rockwell.”

“The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.”

“You got that right. Can’t admire an apple without seeing the worm.”

“How come you got your picture taken with Jerry Ford if you never worked the White House?”

“Whip Inflation Now rally. Chief of Staff was afraid not many people would show up for the photo op. The order went out for warm bodies. I don’t vote Republican but the wife thought the kids might like a memento of their old man in case I got run over by a surveillance van. It attracts business. I think you’ve got a level by now.”

I accepted the invitation. “Were you at the restaurant?”

“No. My job was to work the door at the bookshop. It ended when Cypress finished signing. Where he went from there nobody told me and I didn’t ask. Hurley handed me my check on the spot. I went home to drink beer and sleep and wait for the bank to open. You can check with my wife on that, not that you’d believe her or I’d give you my number at home. If you get it from any other source I won’t go to court. I’ll come see you.”

“Okay.”

“Okay means what?”

“It means you probably wouldn’t lie in your own ballpark. Also it means I don’t want to go another round with this eye. It would just give you something to work on. Finally it means I think you’re too smart to throw in with Hurley on a job not connected with your specialty. He probably wouldn’t even ask. He’s got Herb.”

“Herb. The service turned away a hundred Herbs a week, and fifty Hurleys. Did he tell you he’s Eddie’s publicist?”

“Eddie told me.”

“I know a bit about the work from hanging around the press corps. He couldn’t write a release if you held a knife to his throat and dictated. When a strongarm starts to slow down, you either kick him upstairs or put him out to pasture. Hurley knows how to put studs in a dress shirt, so he didn’t go to the Old Pugs’ Home. He loves his work. I doubt he’s married. He sits home at night and cleans his gun.”

“Did he and Herb fly out with Cypress?”

“They didn’t fly out. They’re still in town.”

That left me silent for a minute. I hadn’t expected that big a break. “Where and why?”

“He’s doing an interview at the NPR station in Ypsilanti this afternoon. They’re running a network feed to New York on account of he’s flying out to the Coast tonight and working his way back east at about five cities per week. He’s sharing a suite with the Brothers Karamazov at the Pontchartrain.” He gave me a number on the twelfth floor.

“Why are you so good to me?”

“I’ve been at this twenty-two years, counting government service and private. I held up my right hand and swore and I didn’t cross any fingers when I did it. People who do ought to be called down. I can listen to a coon joke and not turn a hair, but jokes about gorillas in blue suits make me want to spit. Guys like Hurley and Herb are the reason those jokes get told. Are you figuring on carrying that piece into the suite?”

I bought my jackets and coats one size too big so the tail would hang over the gun without snagging; to someone like Fearing, that was the same as if I had on crossed bandoleros. “I was thinking about it. The last time I left it off I was mishandled.”

“If you wear it in I’m going to call the suite as soon as you leave here and tell them you’re coming. That thing I swore to included not being an accessory to murder. I don’t know you that well.”

I unsnapped the holster and placed it and the Chief’s Special on the desk.

“Good arm,” he said, again without touching. “I’m glad to see you’re not one of the cannon boys. A bullet ought to stay inside the man you fired it at if it’s going to do any good. We used half-loads in the service. The PR was to avoid blowing a hole through a bad guy and hitting an innocent. There’s things I miss about Washington, but PR isn’t one of them. Put it back on. Just try not to use it.”

I returned it to my belt. “Guess you know me better than you thought.”

“If you’d beefed about leaving the gun I’d have known just as much. I don’t suppose it’s any of my business to ask what this is all about.”

“It wouldn’t do you any good to know it. So far all it’s done for me is gotten me slapped around and made me the toast of two police departments.”

“City?”

“One city, one county.”

He sucked air through his teeth. “Those rural boys hunt to eat.”

“I can stay out of that county. It’s the Detroit cops I’m worried about.”

“Need a side man?”

“I don’t hire muscle.”

He got mad for the first time. “I wasn’t drumming up business. I was thinking of taking an early lunch.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I get my own dirt on my own hands.”

He backed off. “Not many of you left.”

“For obvious reasons.”

He raised a hand. It wasn’t quite a gesture of benediction but it increased the distance between the hand and his gun, so I took it in that spirit. On the way out through the reception room I smiled at the woman seated at the computer. She stared back hard. No benediction there.

25

N
o ghosts wander the halls of the Hotel Pontchartrain. It was named for the hotel where shortly after the turn of the twentieth century Ransom E. Olds, the Dodge brothers, and even teetotaling Henry Ford gathered in the bar to discuss their dreams of an industry based entirely upon the manufacture and sale of automobiles, but the original building in Cadillac Square was torn down in 1920. The one at Jefferson and Washington was built in 1965, in the middle of a decade known more for free love than architecture. Its 450 rooms climb a glass wall perched on a horizontal base like one domino stood atop another. I crossed through a lobby that Russell Fearing might have decorated when he was preoccupied and shared the elevator as far as the fifth floor with an old woman in a long white canvas coat like a duster with her hand on the collar of a Rottweiler with a clouded left eye who didn’t like me by half. From there on up to twelve I had the car to myself. They say the hotels will be full when the casinos come. This one hadn’t run out of vacancies since the Republican National Convention in 1980.

I stepped out into a shotgun corridor carpeted in quiet industrial pile with surveillance cameras mounted at the ends. On the way to the Cypress suite I passed a room service cart parked halfway down containing a disorderly pile of smeared crockery, wadded linen, and thick aluminum tray covers shaped like dog dishes. Without pausing I scooped one up by the finger-hole in the center and continued walking, holding it down at my side. The action wouldn’t have attracted even passing interest from whoever was watching the monitors, if anyone was and if the cameras had been activated at that very second; in standard practice they clicked on and off in a random pattern using a half-dozen screens.

I knocked at the door to the suite. “Beverage.”

Feet thumped the floor on the other side. I leaned in, breathed on the convex bubble of glass in the peephole, and stood close, turning away the side of my face with the bruised eye.

There was a pause while whoever was inside tried to see me through the fogged glass.

“What’s that you said?”

I said, “I’m here to restock the mini-bar.”

Another little silence. I hoped he’d given up on the peephole. It would be clearing by now.

The deadbolt opened with a grinding snap. I stepped back to brace myself. If he had the chain on I was out of luck. The door opened, no chain, and I thrust the tray cover into Herb’s broad blank face like a custard pie in a Keaton film. It made a dull clang. I kicked him in the left kneecap. He gasped and lost his balance and I dropped the cover and grabbed him by his nubby knitted black necktie and pulled him forward onto his face. As soon as he hit he tried to roll over onto his right side. That made him a lefty, so I put my foot between his shoulder blades and pushed him flat and leaned down and groped at his belt on the left side, got nothing, and tunneled up under his blue serge suitcoat and grasped a handle and sprang a .44 magnum from an underarm clip. It was the portable model with the four-inch barrel, no plating. I had him figured for the chromed one as big as a T-square, but it must have been too uncomfortable even for him.

I wasn’t through with him—a cracked kneecap and a pie in the face was only interest on the principal I owed him—but the door on the other side of the, sitting room was opening. I just had time to stretch out the arm holding Herb’s magnum like an old-time shootist in a Remington print and catch Sargent Hurley with one hand on the doorknob and the other hitching up his pants. He had his coat off and he was growing a belly, hitching up his pants would be a thing he did every time he stood up from a chair.

He had on a spare pair of glasses just like the ones he’d lost in the parking lot, but he didn’t seem to be seeing through them too well. He stopped short for the gun but there was no recognition on his big spreading face, an older version of Herb’s. I was pretty sure then they were related.

“Fearing was right,” I said. “I guess I am a cowboy, at that.”

“You,” he said, remembering. “What—”

“You, what.” I crossed the room in two strides and laid the four-inch barrel above his left ear. His glasses went one way, he went the other. His shoulder struck the doorjamb hard enough to shake the entire twelfth floor and he slid down it onto his left hip, not smoothly but in jerky little stages, lowering himself gently like a man climbing into a scalding tub. He was dazed, but he wasn’t out.

Covering him, I picked up his glasses and slid them into my pocket with the other pair. “You ought to consider contacts,” I said. “I don’t suppose a spook like you would ever let anyone get near him with a laser.”

“I’m astigmatic. How the hell—” He groped blindly for the jamb.

I leaned down and tapped him with the gun, the right temple this time. When you’ve been slugged on the coconut as many times as I have you develop a feel for the pressure points. He went out like the Rat Pack. “I liked ‘You, what’ better,” I said, to no one who was listening.

By the time I was through with him I had Herb back on my plate. This was getting to be like cleaning the Augean stables. On his feet again, he came at me sideways in that praying mantis position that meant someone had dropped a couple of grand at Colonel Yi’s Academy of Self-Defense and Szechwan Kitchen. The length of a man’s own body is as far as he can kick without a running start, and I let him get almost that far before I raised the magnum to the level of his clavicle and rolled back the hammer.