A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (28 page)

Thaler said, “I’ve had emergency training.”

Fleta said, “What?”

Mrs. Milbocker pressed her lips together for a moment. “I’ll come back and look in on you in a few minutes. Poke your head out into the hall and yell if she becomes hyper. And don’t untie her.”

“Nothing, Fleta,” Thaler said when we were alone. “We’re still investigating what happened to Allison Booth. You remember Gene Booth’s wife?”

“Of course. That poor woman. How horrible. You haven’t caught the man?”

“We’ve got a suspect. You know who he is.”

I shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit up. “She knows, all right.” I spat smoke. “You know plenty, don’t you, sister? Everything except where your boyfriend Birdsall was the night she got poked full of holes, and you can guess that.”

“No. I know exactly where he was. He was in his studio, working late. I was posing for him. He had a deadline.”

“He had a deadline, all right,” I said.

Thaler said, “Shut up, O’Hara. It’s all right if you got your nights mixed up, Fleta. That happens. We won’t hold it against you if you remember it differently from the way you told us the first time.”

The fat cheeks jiggled when she shook her head. “I didn’t lie. He isn’t my boyfriend. We were together, working.”

“It isn’t just the salesgirl anymore,” Thaler said. “We’ve got a corroborating witness who saw Birdsall driving with Allison that night. This one got the license number. It was his car.”

“It’s a mistake.” She tried to raise her hands and encountered resistance. She looked down at her wrists and her face twisted. She looked like the blonde waving the broken bottle in the
Paradise Valley
picture. “Why am I tied up? I don’t do bondage. Who am I, Betty Page?”

I ground the filter between my teeth. “You’ll be tied up a lot tighter if you don’t start telling some truth. Let’s tank her,” I told Thaler.

“O’Hara’s right, Fleta. Right now we can help you, put in a good word. Nobody can blame you for trying to help out a friend. If we give this to the lieutenant it’s out of our hands. He’s got the press on his neck. You could do five years as an accessory.”

“Untie me!” Her voice rose. “Untie me or I won’t say another word!”

I looked at Thaler. She bent over the chair and tugged loose the cloth strips. Fleta rubbed her wrists. Her lower lip stuck out. “Look at those marks. I won’t be able to work for days. I cut my mouth licking an envelope last month and Lowell sent me home for a week, without even an advance to hold me over. He said it was distracting.”

“Lowell, is it?” I laughed nastily. Thaler scowled at me and made a lowering motion with one hand.

“They aren’t bad,” she said.

“Modeling is hard work.” Fleta rubbed with one broad thumb at a nearly invisible pressure-mark at the base of her left hand. “Everyone thinks you’re getting paid all this money to do nothing. If I eat any more than a cracker for lunch I blow up like a balloon. I have to buy all my own makeup, and let me tell you, you can go through a whole lipstick in one session. I’m lucky when I don’t have to buy my own clothes to model in, and when I do they’re almost never any good for anything but modeling. I can’t go out on the street dressed like Diana, Goddess of the Hunt. And the cramping’s awful. Some mornings I feel like I went fifteen rounds with Primo Carnera.”

“Cut it,” I said. “You’ll have me bawling in a minute. Tell me something, Fleta; when you strip for Lowell, does he paint you before or after?”

The coverlet slid off her lap. One massive arm swept up in a pink flash and the side of my head exploded. It was the side with the bad eye. I was blinded for half a second. I groped and caught one of her wrists, but she slapped me again just as hard with the free hand and twisted out of my grasp. Her voice was shrill and she knew every name that couldn’t be printed in the book. Thaler moved in to get a hammerlock on her, but nothing that big had ever moved that fast and Fleta ducked under her arm, scrabbling among the litter of items on the nightstand beside the bed. She got hold of something and hurled herself at Thaler, pinning her to the wall with her huge bosom and belly and swinging her right arm up and down, up and down, stabbing and slashing.

“Tramp!” she screamed. “Nymphomaniac! How many men you need? Bitch! How stupid did you think I was? You think I wouldn’t follow him? Whore!”

Up and down, up and down and up while Thaler got one foot to the side and twisted a shoulder into the wall for leverage and pushed out, shoving against that flesh avalanche with all the strength in her wiry body while the object clenched in the pudgy dimpled fist raked up and down, striking her on the head and neck and behind her back and into her breasts. I lunged and got one arm across the mad old woman’s throat from behind and hauled back with every crack in my ribcage spreading and catching fire. I hauled back and back and hit the bed with my calves and fell over, holding on and dragging her great weight down on top of me while she clawed at my arm with the nails of her free hand and flailed out with the weapon in the other, shrieking names at the top of her lungs. I couldn’t breathe, but I tightened my grip, flexing my biceps until I could feel the veins standing out on them like ropes. She stopped shrieking and started gurgling, fighting now for breath as I increased the pressure. Very slowly her strength began to fail. She stopped clawing and the other hand drifted down.

“Enough!” It was Lieutenant Thaler. “She’s through. Let up.”

I let up. The old woman lay atop me like a sack of bowling balls, wheezing but no longer struggling. I stretched my neck to see past the mound of her shoulder. There were other people in the room now, white heads mostly, with Mrs. Milbocker’s bushy red perm bobbing among them as she forced her way through. Thaler was standing in front of them. The tail of her blouse was pulled out on one side and she’d lost her hairband, but there was no blood. She groped at Fleta Skirrett’s slack fingers and held up a blunt hairbrush made of molded white plastic with a tangle of pink hairs caught in the bristles.

30

The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to truth. Slowly, she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in….

“How c-could you?” she gasped.

I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.

“It was easy,” I said.

—Mickey Spillane
I,
The Jury
(1948)

I
t was another pretty day and most of the people who had gathered in the red-brick structure modeled after the capitol building in Philadelphia were buying tickets for Greenfield Village across the street; but Louise Stan-had said Henry Ford Museum and so I opted for the indoor attraction. I found her just inside the museum entrance, putting on lipstick with the aid of her reflection in the shimmering finish of a black-and-nickel 1949 Mercury in the automobile exhibit. She had on a beige jacket with the sleeves rolled halfway up her forearms and a matching skirt of some material that looked like burlap but was probably unbleached silk. A tricky arrangement involving amber-and-mica combs caught some of her hair above her ears and allowed the rest to fall down her back in a pale spill. She smiled when she saw me and dropped her lipstick into the woven-leather bag she’d been carrying the day we met in the Caucus Club.

“I like the way they display the cars in their natural habitat,” she said. “FaÇades of old-fashioned drive-ins and like that. Clever.”

“The new curator’s idea. They used to have them in plain rows like a time-release parking lot. What have you seen so far?”

“I don’t know where to start. Let’s see, I’ve seen the chair Lincoln was sitting in at Ford’s Theater—I thought you were kidding about that—and some kind of aluminum tube said to contain Thomas Edison’s last breath. Is that genuine?”

“That one was Henry Ford’s idea. He sent his son Edsel to get it. He was as nuts as he was brilliant.”

“I even saw
The Spirit of St. Louis.
I thought it was in the Smithsonian.”

“Jimmy Stewart flew this one in the movie. Washington had even deeper pockets than Henry. Wait till you see the Village. Edison’s laboratory is within walking distance of the Wright brothers’ shop.”

“I wish I had the time. My luggage is outside. I leave here straight for home in an hour. But I’ve been meaning to see this place every visit, and I don’t know when I’ll be back. I hope you don’t mind. Debra’s back from Indiana. We can’t talk at the house without having to answer a lot of pesky questions.”

“I don’t mind. It’s been years since my last visit. If I have to wait till you misplace another Detroit writer I may never make it.”

“The other night was wonderful. I hope you don’t think Booth’s book was all I cared about.”

“Save it until you’ve read it.” I held out the briefcase I’d carried in. It was brand new from Kmart, vinyl over cardboard with the leathergrain printed on.

She hesitated. “What is it? Not the manuscript.”

“Black Lake still has that. These are Booth’s dictation tapes. The manuscript’s probably a long way from complete. When you get it your ghost might need the tapes to finish it.”

She took the case. “I may just make an editor out of you yet.”

“Too risky. I might hop on the wrong subway train and finish up in Brooklyn.”

“Thank you, Amos. I’m sorry it went so hard for you. I still think you should swear out a complaint against Cypress. Possession of a handgun alone would land him in prison.”

“He’d just bargain his way into another immunity. Guys like Glad Eddie only show enough of their cards to win the current hand. Anyway he didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Booth.”

“Poor Gene. Poor Fleta, too. I shouldn’t feel sorry for her, but I do.” I’d given Louise a complete report over the telephone.

“Me, too,” I said. “I liked her even when we were wrestling.”

“Thank God it was just a hairbrush. Is Lieutenant Thaler all right?”

“Just bruised. She can still write her memoirs.”

“You know that’s not the reason I asked. I like her. Anything there?” She turned her violet gaze on me.

“I make it a point never to date anyone who knows more submission holds than I do.” A rib pinched me at the thought.

She saw the face I made. “I hope you saw a doctor.”

“Sports physician in Dearborn. I cleared him of a narcotics charge a couple of years ago. He taped me up for the cost of the roll. It’ll be on the expense sheet.”

“You’re a little old to be taking as many beatings as you do.”

“If that’s a contract offer, I’ll quit and learn to type with all my fingers.”

“Sorry. Nobody wants to read about good guys anymore. It’s all hitmen and serial killers and people who lied for the president. Maybe I’m the one who should think about making a change.”

We went on to a red Edsel. Four decades of shag rugs, polyester neckties, Beanie Babies, and feminine hygiene commercials hadn’t done a thing to make the horsecollar grille look any more beautiful.

“What’s going to happen to Fleta?” she asked.

“Probably nothing. Thaler isn’t keen to hand it over to the county prosecutor, even if he’d thank her for cracking open a forty-year-old egg under his nose. Fleta’s losing a piece of herself every day at Edencrest. Prison wouldn’t be any worse.”

“So Allison Booth’s murder was an old-fashioned crime of passion.”

“It was a little more cold-blooded than that. After Bird-sail left Fleta in his studio, she waited for him to come back with Allison. She picked up one of his palette knives and hid behind the folding screen where the models changed. She didn’t know who she was going to use the knife on, Birdsall or Allison or both, but she’d made up her mind to use it. She was candid about all this after she calmed down. That tussle in her room got the blood flowing to her brain. It was a lucid confession.”

“The police were right, then. Allison was running around behind her husband’s back.”

“For all we know it was the only time. I imagine it’s tough being married to a writer. They live in their heads most of the day. Birdsall was the whore in the picture. He seduced Fleta the way he did all his models and didn’t mind bragging to her that he was out to seduce his best friend’s wife too.”

“But he helped her get rid of the body.”

“It was the only thing he could do, after he got the knife away from her and quieted her down. He was afraid of Booth. Booth was a boxer, remember. The studio was already stained all over with paint. He splashed some cadmium red on top of the blood, wrapped Allison in a dropcloth, and waited till past midnight to smuggle her down to the car and out to that window well. Later, when Fleta told the cops she and Birdsall were working that night, she wasn’t providing an alibi for him. It was for herself.”

“But won’t it all come out now because of Lowell Junior?”

“He’s the main reason it won’t. He believes his father killed Allison. I never met the man, but what I’ve heard doesn’t make me feel a bit uncomfortable to let the cops go on thinking the same thing.”

“What a terrible secret to carry around all these years. No wonder Fleta lost her mind.”

“That was Alzheimer’s. If it weren’t for that she’d still be carrying it. Anyway it was more terrible for Eugene Booth. It was too hard for a tough-guy writer like him to accept the fact his wife was cheating on him, so he told himself the mob killed her because he talked too much about Roland Clifford and the riot. In the end he’d convinced himself of it. Only that was harder on him, because it meant he was indirectly responsible for her death. That’s the ironic part. If he’d just believed the truth in the first place, he’d have gotten over it years and years ago.”

“Maybe not. If there was anything to brood over, he’d have brooded over it, and if there wasn’t, he’d have found something to brood over in its place. For a certain kind of person, that’s as close to happy as they ever get.”

“Could be,” I said. “Fortunately I don’t have to be deep.”

“Right. Everything beads up on you like water on plastic.”

I looked at her. She was hugging herself, stroking one arm. Part of it was Booth, but we happened to be standing in front of the black Lincoln convertible in which JFK had been killed, parked in line in a phantom motorcade made up of automobiles that had carried FDR, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and LBJ; all dead men with middle initials and long-kept secrets of their own. Broken heroes all, like Roland Clifford and Eugene Booth.