A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (3 page)

The drab four-story building that sticks up like a blunt thumb from West Lafayette near the John Lodge Expressway was moved there when the interstate came through in 1947, God knows why. It’s a hundred years old, but there are holes all over the city skyline where older and better-looking structures have been pulverized by the wrecking ball. It had been a glove factory in the thirties and forties, then an empty building after gloves went the way of Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat. That was when John King bought it, tore out most of the partitions, reinforced the interior walls, and filled it top to bottom with books on every subject, from the wit and wisdom of Yogi Berra to the post-metamorphal changes in the vertebrae of the marbled salamander, and by authors as varied as Sinclair Lewis and Louis Farrakhan. You can smell the decayed paper and moldering buckram from the far end of the parking lot. It’s a scent well known to bibliophiles, archaeologists, and private detectives who spend much of their time in records offices and basement file rooms.

In the dank interior I climbed a short flight of steps to the sales counter, where a tall young woman with the profile of an African princess directed me to the second floor. This was a vast space divided by stacks of books on wooden shelves with fluorescent troughs suspended above the aisles. A youngish compact man in glasses and a necktie on a denim work shirt led me to a shallow room off the stairs. The door was secured by a piece of wood stuck through the handle with KEEP OUT PLEASE written on it in Magic Marker.

I thought for a moment I had penetrated to the center of the Denver Mint.

He drew out the piece of wood and let me inside. “The books are arranged by catalogue number. That’s the bible there on the window ledge. I’ll be out here if you need me, shelving books. I’m always shelving books. We process two thousand books per week.”

“I brought this one with me.” I showed him the battered copy of
Paradise Valley.

A lip curled. “We’d charge about a buck for that downstairs.”

“Someone told me it was worth a hundred.”

“Not in that condition. What you see in here is as good as you’ll ever find. The idea was to get literature into people’s hands cheap. That didn’t mean using vellum and good parchment. On a quiet night you can hear the paper crumble.”

“So books aren’t forever.”

“Books are. The material they’re printed on isn’t. That’s what makes the rare titles so rare.”

He left me, although from time to time I saw him looking at me through the glass half-wall that separated the room from the rest of the floor. He must have thought I was a rival dealer.

The paperbacks lined the walls and free-standing cases in solid banks of silver and yellow and black, depending upon the signature color each publisher had chosen for its spines. Each was pocketed in its own glassine bag with a round price sticker pasted on the back. Opaque plastic shades dulled the sunlight coming through the tall outside windows as a further precaution against early demise.

I hefted a three-inch-thick volume off the ledge beneath the glass wall. Its warped cover read
U.S. Paperbacks 1939-1959.
The information inside was listed alphabetically and numerically under publisher headings, cross-indexed by author, title, and catalogue order number. I looked up Booth’s name and found ten titles listed under Tiger Books. I scribbled the numbers into my notebook, returned the volume to the ledge, and turned to the stacks.

The system took getting used to. The books were numbered chronologically, and since few authors were prolific enough to offer a series of new titles in a row, tracking down the entire work of one writer involved skipping from shelf to shelf. After some confusion over why Gardner should occupy the spot next to Thompson, and what Woolrich was doing cozying up to Adams, I got the rhythm at last and wound up with three Booth books from those on the list:
Deadtime Story, Tough Town,
and
Bullets Are My Business.
All the covers appeared to have been painted by the same artist. He had a weakness for broken-nosed brutes and blondes in torn lingerie.

When I emerged from the room, relieved to be breathing a greater volume of oxygen among the odor of mummy wrappings in the larger space, my guide approached on the trot and punched home the piece of wood. Now the books were safe from everyone but John Dillinger.

“There are six more I’m looking for,” I said.

“All we can do is promise to call you if any come in. You can make out a want list at the counter and leave your number.”

“What are the chances I’ll fill it?”

“Ten, fifteen years ago, not bad. These days it’s John Grisham, Stephen King, Anne Rice. Bushels and bushels of romances. We have to turn them away. But you never know: Someone dies, his children clean out the old house, find a box in the attic, and bring it down to see what they can get. Sometimes we strike gold.”

“When someone dies.”

He adjusted his glasses. “There are more ghoulish ways to make a living. It isn’t as if we perch on a dead branch.”

“Who would shelve the books if you did?”

The three books came to fifteen dollars and change. There had been two copies in stock of both
Tough Town
and
Bullets Are My Business,
which apparently weren’t as hard to find as
Paradise Valley.
The African princess arched her brows. They made perfect half-circles above her large clear eyes. “Are you a collector?”

“Yes.” Bills and bruises. “The fellow upstairs wasn’t impressed.”

“He’s a nice guy, but paperbacks aren’t his thing. He prefers to spend his time in the rare book room in the other building, oiling the leather bindings. This is the man you want to compare notes with. He comes in once or twice a week to add to his want list.” She found a business card under the counter and laid it in front of me. “You can keep it. Everyone here has memorized all his numbers by now.”

The information was printed vertically, the way they were doing it now to include fax and cell phone and pager numbers and e-mail addresses and websites. One more communications breakthrough and they’ll have to add a second page. Centered, at the top:

LOWELL BIRDSALL

Systems Analysis

I had a flash of a bald fatty in a
Star Trek
shirt, smelling of Ben-Gay. I thanked her and parked the card in the dead end of my wallet, next to the scratch-and-win tickets I got with ten bucks’ worth of Unleaded.

3

I
‘d read enough for one day. I poked the slim paper sack containing the three books into the glove compartment and tickled the big 455 engine into grumbling life. The new carburetor fed it a good mix and the exhaust bubbled pleasantly in the shiny pipes. When I let it out on the Lodge, the last thirty years beaded up and rolled off the long hood and nubby vinyl top like rain. I switched on the AM radio hoping for Jan and Dean and got a gang of grumps complaining about taxes and the Detroit Tigers. I turned it off and let the wind whistle.

I slid past the orange barrels on the Edsel Ford just ahead of rush hour and exited at Belleville, a low-slung community of strip malls, tract houses, and brick apartment complexes doing their best to look like English manor homes with only picture postcards and old C. Aubrey Smith movies to go by. The farther west you travel on the Ford, the less the place matters; but everyone has to have someone to look down on, and so the citizens of Belleville look down on Romulus, which lies to the east, directly in the flight path to Wayne County International Airport.

The White Pine Mobile Home Park was Eugene Booth’s last known employer and place of residence. The directions I’d gotten had left out a stop sign. I turned too early and drove a couple of miles through flat farmland broken up by mounds of raw earth where subdivisions were going in before I came to a T and retraced my route. I finally found the park, across from a neighborhood of large older houses with tidy lawns and a glowering aspect, like you always see where developers have moved too fast for a community grievance committee to form. The only pines in view were the ones painted on the sign that identified the place. If any had ever stood there, they’d been cleared to make room for the trailers.

The sun was out again, its rays bending through the curvature of the windshield, yet my hands felt cold on the wheel. I’d driven that same car into one of those places once before and things had not turned out well. It had been a long time ago, but I had shot a woman, and I couldn’t think about it without feeling a dull ache in the precise spot where the bullet had gone in.

An Airstream trailer parked just inside the entrance had an enameled OFFICE sign screwed to it. It was a fourteen-foot silver bullet with an outside staircase built incongruously of filigreed wrought-iron. The door made a sound like an empty beer can when I knocked on it. The same callow male voice I’d heard on the telephone earlier invited me to enter.

Everything inside was built to scale except the occupant. A midget chipboard desk stood in front of a louvered half-window with a miniature refrigerator placed within arm’s reach. A chintz-covered loveseat pretended to be a sofa against a painted Sheetrock partition separating the office from what was probably a downsized living quarters at the opposite end of the trailer. There was a two-drawer file cabinet too small for the bloated file folders that had drifted on top, and a perky little buzzer of a battery-operated fan pushed air into the face of the young man seated behind the desk talking into the telephone.

“No, Mrs. Mishak, I didn’t get a request to hold all package deliveries to your trailer. Mobile
home,
I’m sorry, Mrs. Mishak. Yes, Mrs. Mishak, I realize a pile of packages outside your trailer—your mobile
home,
excuse me—outside your mobile home while you’re away is bound to get rained on and invite burglars besides. No, Mrs. Mishak, I’m not calling you a liar, I’m sure you made the request. Unfortunately, Mrs. Mishak, I
don’t
know where it is, because I’ve only been on the job a week, the man who took the request is gone, and I’m up to my
ass
in paperwork I can’t find.” He stopped talking, blinked. “I understand,

Mrs. Mishak. I’m sure the owner will be happy to take your complaint. Have a nice day, Mrs. Mishak.”

He hung up, bent over the telephone, and shouted: “It’s a
trailer,
you fat old sow! You’re fifty years old and you’re living in a fucking box on wheels!”

He was too big for that office, but it wasn’t the office’s fault; he was too big for most rooms that didn’t have frescoes painted on the ceiling. He ran about two-fifty in a plain cotton BVD undershirt with his dirty-blonde hair in a ponytail and blue barbed-wire tattoos encircling his biceps. The biceps were as big around as buckets. The artist would have had to go back for more ink. He had a small gold hoop in one ear and a little yellow stubble on his chin, but he smelled of clean sweat and unscented soap. He was in his early twenties.

“I’m betting she knows all that,” I said. “She’s just dumping the bag out on you.”

“How the hell would you know?” A pair of blue eyes narrowed to paper cuts.

“Because I take that kind of call all the time. You don’t have the corner. The only good thing about it is while I’m talking to people like that I’m not burning good gas driving clear out here from Detroit to talk to jackasses like you who don’t know who their friends are.”

He flexed both arms and I looked around for something to throw at him that wouldn’t just bounce off. There was nothing big enough in the trailer. Then he blew out a lungful of air. The tension went out with it. He nodded. “You’re the detective. Sorry about that. Here.” He opened the little refrigerator, took out two Stroh’s, twisted the top off one, and thumped the other down on my side of the desk.

I twisted the top off mine and we clinked. The beer was ice cold. Moisture had beaded up on the glass. “You didn’t get that tan behind a desk.” His skin was burned as brown as the bottles.

“Up until last week I cut the hedges and mowed the paths between the trailers. That suited me just fine. All I had to deal with was thistles and poison ivy. I’m just filling in here as a favor to the owner. When this gig’s finished he’s going to take care of my dog while I’m at Disney World. If I can’t find one that isn’t housebroken I’ll buy one and un-housebreak it. Even at that he’ll have less shit to deal with than I do.”

“Booth left in a hurry, did he?”

“I don’t know about that. He just didn’t give much notice. He had this big old bucket of a Plymouth and he just threw a suitcase and a portable typewriter into the back seat and drove away. He didn’t peel rubber and he wasn’t looking back over his shoulder. I couldn’t see him doing that even if he was in a hurry. You could have cut off somebody’s head and put it in the drawer where he kept his bottle and he would have just opened it and frowned because he’d have to move the head to get to the bottle. He wasn’t the hysterical type.”

“Sounds like you knew him pretty well.”

“Just to talk to and drink a couple of beers with when it got too hot out to work, like we’re doing. I’m closer friends with that bitch Mishak than I was with Booth.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Sports and politics. He thought most politicians were full of shit and most professional athletes didn’t take enough. He wanted to set up a transfusion.” He had a high thin laugh. It irritated him more than it did me and he poured beer on top of it. In addition to the barbed wire he had a tattoo of a Kewpie doll that stuck out its belly when he bent his arm.

“He didn’t say anything about himself? A couple of beers every now and then is usually good for a little autobiography. A bottle in the drawer is better.”

“That was a gag, on account of he said he was a tough-guy writer. If that’s autobiography, I guess you got me. All I ever saw him drink was beer, and no more than two of those at a stretch. I never saw him drunk. What’d he do, write himself a check and sign it Stephen King?”

“Nothing like that. Someone wants to give him money and I’m supposed to find out where to send it. There’s a few bucks in it for you, too, if you can help.”