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

forwarding?”
    He shook his head. “She picked up her Social Security checks from a box at the Belleville Post Office. You might try there.”
    I wrote
Fleta Skirrett
in the notebook and put a question mark next to it. While I was doing that the telephone rang. “What else have you got?” I asked.
    He shook his head, said hello into the receiver, said “Shit” under his breath, then: “Yes, Mrs. Mishak. The furnace?” He leaned back and turned his head to read the thermometer mounted outside the window. “No, Mrs. Mishak, I don’t guess it
would
be firing, seeing as how it’s eighty-two degrees outside. Well, if you’re cold, why don’t you open a window in your trailer and let some of that heat in? Motor
home,
I’m sorry.…”
    I left him holding the receiver in one hand and gripping the neck of his beer bottle with the other in a stranglehold.

4
    R ush hour had the area by the throat when I got away from there, and I smoked a third of a pack of cigarettes while creeping along in the crush after the driver of a 16,000-pound tractor-trailer rig fell asleep, jumped the median, and plowed into the outbound traffic heading west. A medevac helicopter from the University of Michigan Hospital drifted down near the scene as passing drivers slowed to a crawl to get a glimpse of tangled steel and spilled brains. It would do as an outlet until bear baiting came back into fashion.
    A tired female clerk at the Belleville Post Office had told me Fleta Skirrett had filed a change-of-address from a P.O. box to the Edencrest Retirement Home in Marshall, eighty miles west of Detroit, but that Eugene Booth still maintained his box in Belleville. That was a break I hoped I wouldn’t need; staking out the lobby the third of the month in case Booth came in for his government checks was right up there with having my prostate examined.
    After the traffic jam broke up I bailed out at a suburban mall with a Best Buy and bought a cheap tape player from a hyper young salesman in a Tasmanian Devil necktie. Back home I shooed a salesman out of the office who wanted to set me up with a DNA testing kit, drew a leaf out of the desk to put my feet up on, and finished reading
Paradise Valley
in one sitting. Officer Roland Clifford, the hero of the story, was beaten half to death by the lynch mob, who had then taken the three innocent black defense workers from his custody and torn them apart. The final trial scene, during which a pale and angry Clifford, his head shaved and bandaged, gave testimony against the defendants, was even more tense than the violence. The story came to an end with the conviction of the three ringleaders and Clifford’s promotion to detective sergeant. From there he had gone on to lieutenant, then inspector, and finally precinct commander, and following his retirement had appeared often at ceremonies with various black community leaders as a symbol of racial harmony. He had been dead ten years and the NAACP and the Detroit Chamber of Commerce were discussing changing the name of a section of Outer Drive to Roland Clifford Street in his honor.
    That last part was straight history, and postdated Booth’s book. The narrative ended in a seedy resort motor hotel on Black Lake near the tip of Michigan’s middle finger, with Clifford reading about the verdict in the newspapers while recovering from his injuries. It wasn’t really a happy ending; the blameless dead were still dead, and the rage and intolerance that had led to the tragedy continued to bubble beneath the surface of the World War Two homefront. Whatever rays of hope found their way into Booth’s world did so through a dirty window.
    Dusk was drifting in. An old building is the most efficient telegraph system in the world: On all three floors empty swivel chairs rolled to a rest, file drawers boomed shut, light switches snapped off, stairs creaked under feet heading heavily home. In a little while the cleaning service would arrive, and then would begin the