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