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

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.