A Smile on the Face of the Tiger Read Online Free PDF Page A

got out. I felt like I’d walked in on him jacking off.”
    I was sitting in an orange plastic scoop chair that stuck to my back. The tin trailer was as hot as a kiln. The little fan was blowing me a raspberry. I rolled the cold bottle across my forehead. “So far all I’m getting for my twenty is a bad case of B.O.”
    “He left some stuff behind. It’s in a box in back. I can get it.”
    He stayed put after saying it and I looked at him until he put down his beer and got up and slid around the partition. He had to stoop to keep from colliding with the headliner and the trailer shifted on its springs when he walked to the other end.
    While he was gone I applied beer to my insides and the container to my outside. All over the park windows were open. Somebody was whistling, somebody else was hacking up last night’s smoke, the Jeffersons were moving on up to the East Side, a kid with a cardboard ear was blowing a trombone. What sounded like a neighborhood soccer game was going on someplace where trailers had not yet gone in, complete with body blows and adolescent voices trying out their Martin Scorsese vocabulary. It was another spring, and here I was pushing around Andrew Jackson and waiting for him to push back, just as I had been doing in January.
    The big man came back carrying a fiberboard carton with the big Seagram’s 7 stenciled on it in red. When he plunked it down on the desk I lifted my chin to see over the open top. It looked like the usual junk people leave behind. If it were worth anything at all to anyone it would have gone with them. That’s the trouble with detective work. You have to find out where they went to get a look at the things that might tell you where they went.
    “Just books and cassette tapes,” he said. “The books are falling apart and even the cassettes are held together with Scotch tape; he must have played the hell out of them. His taste in music was all over the map.”
    He sat down to finish his beer while I reached inside without looking, grab-bag fashion, and brought out a flat rectangle of stiff plastic. The cassette was played three-quarters through. The label read LYNYRD SKYNYRD . Yellowed strips of transparent tape were folded over the corners.
    I went back for more. Three cassettes this time: Reba McEntire, Santana, an album of Christmas songs played on bagpipe by the Scots Greys military band. The top corners of each wore strips of tape. My host must have been a CD man not to know what that meant.
    Not that it meant anything that would do me any good. I dropped the tapes back into the box and sat back. “Was he chummy with any of the residents?”
    “Not if he was smart. A lot of them are retired. Their kids don’t come to see them and all they need is a friendly excuse to drop into the office and bend your ear for three hours. Then there’s the scum that gives trailer parks a bad name. If you snuggle up to them you run the risk of getting nailed as an accomplice in a beef for receiving stolen goods, and if you get on their blind side you can wind up with a couple of slugs in you.” He lifted his bottle to his lips, but he didn’t swig from it. “Well, there was Fleta Skirrett.”
    “You made up that name.” But I was reaching for my notebook and pen.
    “I don’t have that much imagination. She lived in thirty-six, over in the next row. Not bad to look at, if you like your meat fat. Booth went over there to make repairs two or three times a week. Nothing breaks down that often. None of the trailers here are more than ten years old.”
    “Romance?”
    “All I know is he never put on a clean shirt to visit any of the others.”
    “Thirty-six, you said?”
    “Until last month. She was starting to get a little screwy, cranking up the TV late at night and leaving her keys in the door. After the cops found her wandering down Merriman in pink mules and a flannel nightie her family came and got her. She’s in a home somewhere now, I guess.”
    “No