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

Burnett. I’m surprised you’re not halfway up I-75 by now.”
    “He mentioned Black Lake specifically in
Paradise Valley
, but it didn’t register until I read another book and heard the tapes. He didn’t say which motel. There were probably several of them even then. By now there are dozens.”
    His brow went slick in thought. Then he got up and went to a shelf packed with orange Tiger Books spines, pulled out a book, and removed something in a glassine envelope from inside the front cover. He returned the book to the shelf and faced me, holding the object flat to his solar plexus with both hands. They completely covered it.
    “He sent my father a postcard when he was writing
Some of My Best Friends Are Killers
. That was in fiftysix, a few months after he lost his wife. I found it in Dad’s papers when I was getting ready to sell the house. It’s the nearest thing to a letter he had from Booth.”
    I waited, but he didn’t bring it over. I sat back and got very tired. “How much?”
    “I want an advance reading copy of the new book when it’s ready. And I want the tapes with his dictation.”
    “I can probably arrange the reading copy. I can’t give you the tapes without Booth’s permission.”
    The muscles worked in his forearms. I couldn’t figure out where he got his exercise unless it was from climbing stepladders in bookshops. “Well, will you ask him when you talk to him? I’ll give him a good price and promise not to go public with the contents. I’ll sign a paper to that effect.”
    “I’ll ask.”
    He came over and held out the item. I took it and looked at it without sliding it out of its transparent envelope. It was a postcard with a canceled three-cent stamp in the corner, postmarked
Black Lake, Sept. 12, 1956
. The handwriting, in faded brown ink, was Booth’s:
    Lowell,
    Fishing’s good, writing stinks. Thinking of turning my Smith-Corona into a boat anchor.
    Gene
    The other side was a hand-tinted photograph of four rectangular one-story log cabins strung out to the right of a fifth with a red neon VACANCY sign in the front window. A sign shaped like an Indian arrow hung by a pair of chains from a horizontal post above the door:
    WIGWAM MOTOR LODGE.
    “Is it still there?”
    “The local chamber of commerce will know if it is.”
    I fanned myself slowly with the card. I wasn’t hot. My hand needed a cigarette. “Lonely place to go when your wife just died.”
    “I doubt he got any fishing in at all, despite what he said on the card. He probably worked the whole time. The rage would have eaten him up otherwise. It got bad enough later to destroy his career.”
    “Why rage?”
    “Well, from the way she died.” He stared at me browlessly, reading the same empty expression on my face. His goatee dropped. He gathered it in too far and had to work his lips loose to speak. “I thought a detective would know. Allison Booth was murdered. The police never found her killer.”

9
    R emind me to unload all my stock. When
you
start looking prosperous, the economy’s getting set to slide the other way.”
    I said, “Now, is that nice? I put on the new suit just for you.”
    Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler conned me through the slight correction of her oversize glasses. She barely needed them and probably only wore them to blunt her cheerleader good looks. This season she was wearing her light brown hair short, with springy bangs arcing out over her forehead. She wore no makeup apart from a little pink lipstick and had on a fitted taupe linen shirt and pleated khaki slacks, huaraches on her bare feet with clear polish on the nails. The unlined charcoal blazer she would wear to cover the holster behind her right hip hung on the back of her desk chair. She was stretched out on the fabric-covered sofa she had finally earned for her office at Detroit Police Headquarters, with her ankles crossed and the
Michigan Penal Code
bound in red braced on her lap.
    “It’s a good suit, too, for off-the-peg,”