Free A Smile on the Face of the Tiger by Loren D. Estleman

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