A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (8 page)

In front of 610 I leaned on the leprous iron railing to finish my cigarette and watch the shadows cross the Detroit River on the other side of Jefferson. At that hour the Windsor skyline looked like a row of books of uneven heights and thicknesses. It was the only spot on the North American continent where you could look across at a foreign country without seeing either wilderness or tattoo parlors. I snapped the filter end at the homebound traffic and turned around and knocked on the door.

The man who opened it didn’t look like the son of an artist or a systems analyst or a man named Lowell Birdsall. He was built like a retired professional wrestler going to fat, with rolls of slackening muscle straining the neck of his clean white T-shirt and a dusting of stubble on his shaven head. His ears lay flush to his skull and he had no eyebrows, so that the top half of his face was frozen in an expression of perpetual surprise. A black smudge of moustache and goatee beard covered the lower half. He looked as if he could take me, but he’d have had to climb a stepladder to do it. His broad chest, thick arms, and great muscular thighs belonged to a six-footer who’d been put through a trash compactor.

“The P.I.?” he greeted. “May I see your license?”

I showed him the photo ID. His goatee drooped.

“That’s all there is to it? I thought there’d be a seal or something.”

“That’s Eagle Scout.” But I took pity on him and let him see the half of the wallet with the sheriff’s star attached. He gathered up his chin then and nodded. I stepped around him into the nearest thing to a combination museum and indoor amusement park I’d ever seen in a tiny apartment.

One wall was painted white to set off the art that decorated it. Original canvases and movie posters in metal frames plastered it from ceiling to floor and from side to side, waging a war of primary colors toward a single objective: enumerating the variety of ways in which a man and a woman can put each other in mortal jeopardy. I saw guns and broken bottles, saps and baseball bats, Tommy guns and in one instance a machete, all raised and ready to spill the maximum amount of blood onto the Deco carpet at the base of the display. Red lips snarled on the women, Cro-Magnon brows beetled on the men in a blown-up comic-book parody of animal emotion stood up on its hind legs and wrapped in a trenchcoat or lacy lingerie. A connoisseur now, I recognized Lowell Birdsall Senior’s brushstroke on a couple of the canvases, but the others, cruder and more angular, must have set his son back several months’ pay at collectors’ shows and specialty shops.

It was a hell of a thing to fall asleep looking at, but the pull-down ring belonging to a Murphy bed socketed into the wall opposite said that was how Birdsall found unconsciousness every night. He probably dreamed in cadmium red, phthalo blue, and titanium white.

Someone had taken down the plaster from the other walls, ripped out the laths, and installed shelves between the studs. I looked without wonder at the unbroken rows of Pocket Books silver, Penguin green, Fawcett yellow, and all the other trademark spine colors, arranged not alphabetically by author or title, but by catalogue order number. An additional forty or fifty occupied an original drugstore revolving rack with a Dell Books decal on each of the crossbars. There was a bondage theme on the cover of
The Hound of the Baskeruilles.
I couldn’t remember such a scene anywhere in Sherlock Holmes. The room smelled musty despite the efforts of a small dehumidifier to slow the decay.

Birdsall crossed the room silently on white-stockinged feet—his loose-fitting jeans, like his tight T-shirt, were white too, like the uniform of an orderly in a burn unit—and lifted the needle from a long-playing record on the turntable of a cabinet phonograph. It was a vintage machine with two built-in speakers and shiny panels of amber-colored Bakelite streaked with black. June Christy stopped singing with a squawk and we were left alone with the hum of the dehumidifier.

There wasn’t room for much more furniture, but it was all period. A laminated table held up a Domino’s box and a glass that looked as if it had contained buttermilk, with three tubular chairs upholstered in shiny red vinyl drawn up to it. There was a loveseat covered in nubby green fabric with gold threads glittering in it standing on skinny black-enameled steel legs and a yellow wing chair with a tri-colored hassock that resembled a beach ball. If a beatnik didn’t come bopping through the door in the next five minutes I was going to be sore.

A laptop computer lay open on the loveseat, looking as if it had dropped from outer space into Ozzie and Harriet’s living room. That would be what paid the rent.

“It’s the most complete collection in private hands in the Midwest,” Birdsall was saying in his dreamy voice. He was looking at the books, not the furniture. “I turned down twenty thousand just last year from a collector in California.”

“Twenty thousand.” There were cracks in the ceiling and I could hear the toilet running in the bathroom.

“What would I do with money? Just spend it, probably on books, and start all over again. You don’t get to own the largest collection in the world by going back to the gate at my age. Do you collect?”

“I’m reading Eugene Booth now.”

“I might have guessed. Read him a lot, I bet. You look like you stepped right out of
Bullets Are My Business.
Tiger Books, number nine-fourteen. It’s at seven o’clock.”

I glanced at the spine. “I’ve got it. I’m mostly interested in
Paradise Valley.
Fleta Skirrett told me your father painted the cover.”

When he smiled, wrinkles stacked his face clear to the top of his head. He wasn’t that old; his skin was just dry from rooming with a dehumidifier. I wondered if he ever went out, except to buy more books and launder his whites. “How
is
Fleta? I had the biggest crush on her when I was thirteen.”

“Most complete in the Midwest. She told me.”

“I saw her at Dad’s funeral. She got fat. Living’s hell. But on the cover of
Paradise Valley
she’ll always be as beautiful as nineteen fifty-one.”

It was an opening, but I didn’t jump through it. Once a man starts talking about what he likes, you’re in the box with a fastball heading straight for the sweet spot. “Is that why you collect?”

“Partly. Life goes fast. Faster now, thanks to that.” He gestured at the laptop. “You want to hold on to something, and you think if you don’t do it, no one else will. Then it’s lost for good. Did you know that more than seventy percent of the books published originally in paperback between nineteen thirty-nine and nineteen sixty are moldering away, with no publisher offering to step forward to reprint them? I’m more in the way of a curator.”

“That puts you in the arts. Just like your father.”

“My father was a son of a bitch.”

I looked at him. His face and scalp were as smooth as a ball bearing. The smile-wrinkles had left no trace. I asked him if I could sit down. He indicated the yellow wing chair and moved the computer to make room for himself on the loveseat. He sat with his knees together and his hands on them. Big hands, they were; wrestler’s mitts. He must have had trouble negotiating a keyboard with those banana-size fingers.

“He cheated on my mother with all his models. I never blamed the models—brainless creatures, mostly, sleeping with all the wrong people to get ahead. I mean,
artists,
come on! Nobody with genuine talent has ever been in a position to give anybody else a leg up. They’re too busy looking for their next meal. No, the blame begins and ends with my father. He got so he wouldn’t even bother to change shirts before he went home. Most people remember the smell of their mother’s perfume. I can’t separate it from all the others. She killed herself when I was in college. The state police said it was an accident. She ran her car into a bridge abutment on I-75. There were no skid marks.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “That’s his line, and he never said it. He wore a black armband for a fucking year. It got him laid even more. And the older he got, the younger they got. He blew out his heart at seventy-eight plowing a sixteen-year-old redhead. I didn’t go to see him buried.”

“But you live in his old studio, and you collect books whose covers he painted.”

“I’m Lowell Birdsall’s son.” The smile he made didn’t stir so much as a wrinkle. “I collect the same models he did, and for the same reasons. The rent’s cheap enough to allow me to do that. The only difference is I just look at them. I’m a virgin, the oldest in Detroit.”

The dehumidifier lapped up moisture through the silence. I showed him my pack. He shook his head again.

“Please don’t. It’s very dry in here.”

I put it away. “I’m looking for Eugene Booth on be-half of his publisher. Fleta Skirrett said he and your father were friends. Have you stayed in contact?”

“Not since my mother’s death, when I stopped going home to visit. Actually, before that. After Booth’s wife died, he started double-dating with my father and his models. He used to drop by the house to visit, but he stopped coming eventually. I think he was ashamed to look my mother in the eye. My theory is he knew my father didn’t care, so he decided to feel bad enough for both of them. That’s why I read his books. He had a decency I didn’t get to see very often. It runs through even his most hardboiled stories.”

“Miss Skirrett used the word
decency
too. It seems to have been important to both of them.”

“As much as money to a poor man. Writers and artists and actors and models have been looking for respectability since Shakespeare. But Fleta can tell you more about Booth than I can. They live in the same trailer park.”

“Not anymore.” I told him Booth had left and Fleta was living at Edencrest.

“The waiting room,” he said.

“It seems nice.”

“They all seem nice. Some of them are. It doesn’t change the fact that nobody leaves under their own power. She’s a courageous woman. It’s Booth who ran away.”

“I think I know which way he ran.”

“So do I.”

We shared that through a little humming pause. I ended it. “You go first.”

He spread his big hands on his knees. “When I was a boy I was too busy hating my father and ogling the women he painted and went to bed with and hating myself for ogling them to pay much attention to the books he wrapped them around. It’s ironic that I spend most of my income filling these shelves. The original typescripts were always coming through here, with the scenes the publishers wanted illustrated marked off for him to read. Booth used Alamo stationery he stole to save on paper. I don’t think Dad ever read any of them all the way through, and he probably threw them out after he got what he needed. The typesetters had copies and no one thought they’d ever be worth anything. If I’d pulled just five or six of them out of the trash, I could sell them now and finance my whole collection. Anyway, I’ve read them all since in the form most people saw them. You can learn a lot about a writer by reading all his books one after the other. Patterns establish themselves. I knew Jim Thompson had an anal fixation before I found out he suffered from severe hemorrhoids, and I figured out Cornell Woolrich was homosexual before the literary revisionists started in on him. Sooner or later, every one of Eugene Booth’s heroes drift up to northern Michigan to think things out in some cheap rented bungalow in the woods. There was usually a lake nearby. He was a Thoreau wannabe. You’ll find him in some Walden up north.”

“The question is which one. Fleta Skirrett said he liked to fish. Did you ever hear him say where he liked to do it?”

“Black Lake. It’s up by Hammond Bay. He used to go there to write. I heard him tell my father once he couldn’t write about a city while he was living in it. He had to go where there weren’t any car horns to hear them clearly enough to describe the sound. Of course, that’s when he was writing. He hasn’t produced a thing since fifty-nine.”

“He’s writing again. His replacement at the trailer park gave me some tapes with his dictation on them.”

He got excited. His smile went clear over the top of his head and down into his shirt. “That’s the best news I’ve heard since they found an unpublished novel by W. R. Burnett. I’m surprised you’re not halfway up I-75 by now.”

“He mentioned Black Lake specifically in
Paradise Valley
, but it didn’t register until I read another book and heard the tapes. He didn’t say which motel. There were probably several of them even then. By now there are dozens.”

His brow went slick in thought. Then he got up and went to a shelf packed with orange Tiger Books spines, pulled out a book, and removed something in a glassine envelope from inside the front cover. He returned the book to the shelf and faced me, holding the object flat to his solar plexus with both hands. They completely covered it.

“He sent my father a postcard when he was writing
Some of My Best Friends Are Killers
. That was in fiftysix, a few months after he lost his wife. I found it in Dad’s papers when I was getting ready to sell the house. It’s the nearest thing to a letter he had from Booth.”

I waited, but he didn’t bring it over. I sat back and got very tired. “How much?”

“I want an advance reading copy of the new book when it’s ready. And I want the tapes with his dictation.”

“I can probably arrange the reading copy. I can’t give you the tapes without Booth’s permission.”

The muscles worked in his forearms. I couldn’t figure out where he got his exercise unless it was from climbing stepladders in bookshops. “Well, will you ask him when you talk to him? I’ll give him a good price and promise not to go public with the contents. I’ll sign a paper to that effect.”

“I’ll ask.”

He came over and held out the item. I took it and looked at it without sliding it out of its transparent envelope. It was a postcard with a canceled three-cent stamp in the corner, postmarked
Black Lake, Sept. 12, 1956
. The handwriting, in faded brown ink, was Booth’s:

Lowell,

Fishing’s good, writing stinks. Thinking of turning my Smith-Corona into a boat anchor.

Gene

The other side was a hand-tinted photograph of four rectangular one-story log cabins strung out to the right of a fifth with a red neon
VACANCY
sign in the front window. A sign shaped like an Indian arrow hung by a pair of chains from a horizontal post above the door: