“G.I. Jack” was written especially for this collection and has never previously been published.
G.I. JACK
A Four Horsemen Story
Loren D. Estleman
Burke said, “What’s with Mac? I offered to set him up with a redhead that rooms with a blonde I got my eye on and he said it was no-go.”
The detective first grade was addressing his superior, Lieutenant Max Zagreb. They were at 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters, in the fourth year of the Second World War. Detective Third Grade McReary was dimly visible in a far corner reading by the light of a gooseneck lamp.
Just like Lincoln, Zagreb thought. He said, “He’s got ambition. He’s studying for the sergeant’s exam.”
“What for? The higher you go, the less people you got to blame stuff on.”
“Do yourself a favor. Cancel the date and spend the evening with your wife for a change.”
“She’d just think I was up to something.”
Zagreb found McReary immersed to his eyebrows in books piled on the desk of an officer currently ducking sniper fire on Iwo Jima. The lieutenant slid the volume off the top of a stack, a fifty-year-old chronicle of murders in both hemispheres. A puff of desiccated paper came out when he cracked it open, making him sneeze. He snapped it shut.
“You know they’re not going to ask you this shit on the test. Burke and Hare? Them dumb Doras in the brass’ll think it’s an insurance firm.”
McReary, the bottom face on the totem pole of Detroit’s fabled Four Horsemen (the Detroit Racket Squad, to the uninitiated), slid his fedora back from his prematurely bald head. “Once you get started, it’s hard to stop. I know the Michigan Penal Code back to front; I can ace that, but they’re always looking for more. Most of these old criminal cases were cracked. If I can get a handle on how it was done, I stand to nail the orals.”
“Just so long as it don’t get in the way of the job. We got a line on a truckload of Australian kangaroo meat that Frankie Orr’s looking to pass off as South American beef docking down in Wyandotte, tonight or tomorrow night. My money says it jumps on the side of a rationing violation.” He smiled. “Jumps, get it?”
Under ordinary circumstances the junior member of the squad would chuckle at his superior’s joke. He grunted only, absorbed deeply in the Crippen poisoning case.
The telephone jangled on yet another vacant desk. It was Lieutenant Osprey with Homicide.
“Yeah, Ox,” Zagreb said.
“The name’s Oswald. I got a streetwalker carved up like a side of beef I ain’t seen since before rationing.”
“Since when is a hooker murder a Racket Squad deal?”
“Look, I’m shorthanded since D-Day. If you like I can tell the papers she slept with Goering. We can recant on page eight.”
“Something tells me I’m not getting the full story. Oh, right: I’m talking to Ox Osprey, the cop who pled the Fifth seventeen times during the McHenry grand trial.”
“So I sprang a small-time bootlegger in return for a case of good Canadian for my tenth anniversary. The head of the review board shot golf with Frankie Orr the day he suspended me. It was Orr’s liquor.” The homicide lieutenant dropped his voice to a whisper. Zagreb had to press the receiver tightly to his ear to catch the words.
“Listen, we got the button tight on this one. She’s number three. All killed the same way: throat slit, stomach cut open, and her guts dumped alongside the body. I need the manpower before the press jumps in and takes page one away from Patton’s Third Army.”
“Enlighten me on how three dead hookers outscore a thousand of our boys in Europe.”
“The press is sick of troop movements and how MacArthur takes his shrimp tempura. You know how they like to get their hands into a sex murder up to their elbows.”
Zagreb took down the particulars, depressed the plunger, and called Sergeant Canal’s home number. That month the most intimidating member of the squad was living in an apartment on Michigan Avenue directly above a barbershop whose phones never seemed to stop ringing. He owed his cheap rent to a landlord who made the very good case that a little bookmaking on the side compensated for most of his clientele taking their haircuts free courtesy of the U.S. military.
“We got a name to go with the latest stiff?” he shouted above the jangling.
The lieutenant looked at his notes. “Bette Kowalski.” He spelled it. “Ox’s witnesses says she pronounced it ‘Betty,’ like Bette Davis.”
“Yeah, she was clear about that.”
“You knew her?”
“Not in the biblical sense, if that’s any of your goddamn business, Lieutenant, sir. Since she’s dead, I can tell you she was a firehose of information, depending on what we had in the kitty. We dumped over three warehouses of tires, gasoline, and fresh eggs on her word alone.”
“Firehoses have to be connected somewhere.”
“It ain’t exactly a trade secret. We could’ve turned him over a couple of dozen times, only we’d have spent the rest of the war finding out who took his place and how he operates. Plenty of time to crank him up to the Milan pen once we run Old Glory up Schicklgruber’s ass.”
“You’re saying Frankie Orr’s added pimping to his repertoire?”
“I don’t know what that is, but if it’s buying tail on the street, Frankie’s the man to see.” Canal cleared his throat; an operation similar to coal sliding down a chute. “I ain’t saying this because I need the sleep. We need to corral these bats in broad daylight.”
Zagreb had something intelligent in reply; but just then a horse came in at thirty-to-one and the noise level on Canal’s end made conversation impossible.
—
For formality’s sake, the entire squad convened in the Wayne County Morgue to get a look at the only real evidence in any case of homicide: the victim’s body naked in a pull-out tray, clay-pale except for the blue-black smile the last person she’d known had carved under her jawbone and the black cotton cross-stitches the medical examiner had used to close the incisions he’d made to examine her entrails. She’d been basted together like a made-to-order outfit for a first fitting, and from the extent of the repair work the damage had been more than substantial. She looked very young. As many stiffs as Zagreb had seen, he never got over how the brutal act of murder returned even the most jaded victims to innocence.
“You okay?” he asked McReary. “You look a little green.”
“It’s the iodoform, L.T. Ma bought it by the gallon during the influenza scare in ’19 and doused us all by the day.”
“Garlic, me,” Canal said. “I ain’t just sure if the old lady meant it for the ague or vampires.”
Lieutenant Osprey tipped back a flask, exposing the tender flesh under a jaw cut with a miter. He didn’t offer to share it with the others. “What I think? He paid his girls on the installment plan, she preferred cash-and-carry. She beefed, he cut.”
“I saw a seal blow ‘Anchors Aweigh’ on horns in the circus. I guess he thought that was thinking, too.” Burke, who had a phobia against promotion, never missed a chance to take a shot at rank, with the single exception of Lieutenant Max Zagreb.
That party fired another question at Osprey just as his neck began to redden. “What about the others?”
A dilapidated notebook came out. “One colored, semi-pro, the other first-generation Albanian with a solicitation record as long as Errol Flynn’s dick. Three nights apart, a little over six weeks ago.”
“Why the dry spell, you figure?”
“I don’t know, but it’s a break: The press might not make the connection after all this time, but we got to sew this one up before he puts another notch on his belt.”
“He’s on a cycle.”
They looked at McReary, whose face had begun to show some normal color. “Some of these mass murderers go by phases of the moon or the Zodiac or the anniversary of their mothers’ death. If we can nail it down, and study the behavior of known killers, we might narrow the field of susp
ects.”
“What the hell’s Dick Tracy Junior flapping his gums about?” Osprey demanded.
Zagreb smiled patiently. “He’s cramming for the sergeant’s exam, picking over the lush and fascinating history of crime; got it on the brain.”
“No kidding. I got my first promotion by doing my damn job.”
“And got busted drinking Frankie Orr’s booze,” Burke said.
Osprey swung his way, fists bunched at his sides. Zagreb, standing in for the League of Nations, distracted him by pressing for more details.
The other scowled, but uncrumpled his notebook and paged back, seesawing his arm as he tried to make out his own weeks-old scrawl. The first victim, Charlotte Adams, had been discovered flayed open in an alley off Grand River in the wee hours by a beat cop. A derelict found her colleague, Maria Zogu, in a trash bin behind the Albanian restaurant where she scooped up most of her clientele. Eyewitness descriptions of companions they were with when last seen were scattered and useless.
“Canal says Kowalski pounded the pavement for Frankie Orr. What about the others?”
“Indies, by all accounts. Say, maybe there’s something in that. He’s nailed down the steelhaulers’, garbage-collectors’, and launderers’ unions across three counties. Maybe he’s moving in on the sex trade, making an example of the holdouts.”
“Then why Kowalski? She worked for him.”
“She wanted out.”
“Listen to the quiz kid,” Burke said. “Got an answer for everything except how to close a case on his own.”
Osprey wheeled on him. “You want to mix it up, Detective, there’s an empty tray right next door.”
Zagreb said, “Let’s leave the fighting to the boys in uniform and see where it happened.”
Bette Kowalski had shared a third-floor walk-up on Erskine with a girl who said she worked a drill-press at the Chrysler tank plant. Zagreb was inclined to believe her: She was a pudding-face brunette who bore no resemblance at all to Rosie the Riveter. None of the swing-shift queens he’d known did.
“I worked days,” she said. “That way we only had to have the one bed. That’s where I found her.” She pointed at a gaunt iron-framed veteran with bare springs. “I got rid of the mattress, but I’m sleeping on the couch anyway. I told the landlady I’m moving out first chance I get.” She hugged herself, although the room was stuffy.
“Both doors locked, hall and street,” Osprey added. “Let him in, probably. All part of the job.”
Zagreb flicked his gaze at Canal, who nodded and touched the girl’s arm, steering her into a corner to ask innocuous questions out of earshot of the rest of the conversation.
“She must’ve been a mess,” Zagreb told the man from Homicide.
“If we found her on the riverfront, I’d’ve thought she got washed up after getting chopped up by the propeller of the mail boat. Working behind closed doors, without interruption, the son of a bitch had all the time in the world.”
McReary said, “Ah!”
Osprey turned his head. “You said what?”
“Just, ‘Ah!’ ”
“We’ll pay Frankie a visit,” Zagreb said, glancing sideways at the detective third grade.
“You need me for that?” Osprey asked.
He knew the prospect of spending time in the same room with Orr wouldn’t appeal to the man who’d accepted a case of his liquor. “We’re used to him, Ox. We’ll take it from here.”
The other was so relieved he forgot to take issue with the nickname.
—
“Spill it,” Zagreb said. They were sitting in the 1940 Chrysler the department had issued the squad before the auto industry turned its attention from Air-Flow transmissions to airplanes, Burke at his station behind the wheel, the lieutenant beside him.
McReary, sharing the backseat with Canal, blushed. “Just a hunch, when you said what Ox said about the perp having more time to finish the job because he and the victim were indoors. It reminded me of something I just read. Don’t know why I didn’t make the connection before: prostitutes cut up and left to be found, the last the worst of all because it was done in a private apartment.”
“Drop the other shoe, Baldy,” Burke said. “Some of us only squeaked through high school by sitting next to the smartest kid in class.”
“The Whitechapel murders, London, England, fall of 1888.”
He glanced around at the faces turned his way, brows lifted. “Any takers?”
“I seen a movie or two,” Canal said. “Just what we needed. Didn’t have enough on the burner with saboteurs, rioters, and the black market, no sir. Let’s throw in Jack the Ripper Junior, just to ice the cake.” He crumpled his soggy cigar into a ball and threw it out the open window.
—
The Negro who opened the door of Frankie Orr’s forty-room house in Grosse Pointe said his employer was out.
“Where’d he be, then, Jeeves?” Canal asked. “We been to his suite in the Book-Cadillac. That butler said try here. I rolled boxcars that looked less alike.”
“I can’t tell you apart either,” said the man, without irony. “If the police can’t find him, I certainly can’t.”
A female voice called out behind him, sounding slightly soused. “Tell ’em to try the yacht club. They can scrape him off the hull with the barnacles.”
“Who was that?” asked McReary, when the paneled door shut in their faces.
“Mrs. Orr,” Zagreb said. “She must’ve caught him squeezing one of his other tomatoes.”
“Well, at least we won’t be burning off gas the boys need on Okinawa.” Burke turned toward the Chrysler.
The Grosse Pointe Yacht Club was just a few blocks away, a structure of Venetian design, complete with Gothic arches and a soaring bell tower, built directly into Lake St. Clair. They parked in a sandy lot off Vernier and entered the office, where a salty manager informed them Mr. Orr’s boat could be found in slip nine.
The boat in the slip was a converted Great War minesweeper with Gloria painted on the stern. McReary said, “I thought his wife’s name was Estelle.”
“Gloria was his gun girl during Prohibition,” Zagreb said. “She reinforced a handbag with steel so it didn’t sag when he saw a cop and slipped her his rod.”
“What happened to her?”
“Making flack jackets for the Air Corps last I heard. Ahoy the boat!”
A man dressed as a deckhand, in canvas trousers and a striped jersey with the sleeves rolled up past his swollen biceps, came to the rail carrying a Tommy gun. “Scram, bo.”
Burke shielded his eyes. “That you, Rocks? I thought the warden had you working the jute mill in Jackson.”
“Still would be, if Mr. Orr didn’t spring me legal.” The machine gun lowered. “Sorry, Detective. I thought you was somebody else.”
“I usually am. This is my lieutenant, Max Zagreb. You can call him Lieutenant. We’re here to palaver, not pinch.”
Rocks gestured with the Tommy and the Horsemen climbed a rope ladder. The boat swayed when their weight hit the deck. “She don’t draw much water,” Zagreb said.
“Mr. Orr replaced the brass with aluminum. Put in four Rolls Royce engines so he could outrun the Coast Guard with a thousand gallons of Old Log Cabin in the hull.”
“Rocks left out the part about me giving up running contraband after Repeal.” The new voice belonged to a slender man whose black hair gleamed at the temples under the sweatband of a yachting cap with an anchor embroidered on it in gold thread. He wore a double-breasted blazer, white duck trousers, gum soles, and a silk ascot tucked into the open collar of his shirt.
“Throat sore, Frankie?” Zagreb snatched the weapon from the deckhand and thrust it at Burke, who took it. “Ever hear of the Sullivan Act?”
Orr said, “Rocks is in the naval reserve. He’s licensed to carry it in case we run into a U-boat.”
Canal grinned around a fresh cigar. “G’wan with you. The service don’t take ex-cons.”
“They’re l
ess picky in the merchant marines. Let’s go in the saloon.”
“Salon,” corrected Rocks. “You told me to remind you, boss.”
“It’s Captain when we’re on the water. Go swab the deck or something while I speak with these gentlemen.”
They descended a gangway into a wide cabin containing a chrome bar and an evenly tanned blonde standing behind it in a white sharkskin swimsuit. “Cocktail?”
The visitors ordered bourbon all around except for McReary, who asked for a Vernor’s. She mixed, served, and exited the cabin when Orr jerked his chin toward the gangway. Zagreb caught Burke admiring the creamy band of untanned skin where fabric met flesh. “Down, boy.” He stirred his glass with a finger and sucked it. “Trouble at home, skipper?”
Orr frowned. “I guess you seen Estelle. She’s got a private dick watching the hotel, so I have to smuggle in my hobbies in a dinghy on the Canadian side of the lake.”
Canal said, “Try keeping your dinghy at home.”
The lieutenant said, “You’re mellowing. In the old days you’d drop a snooper out in the middle tied to a Chevy short block.”
“Not that I ever done anything like that, but the agency’s run by a retired police inspector. You cops hang together a lot tighter than the Purple Gang ever did.”
“We’re like the Masons that way. Hear what happened to Bette Kowalski?”
“I don’t know no one by that name.”
Zagreb wobbled good bourbon around his mouth and swallowed. “It gets old: You play dumb, we get tough, you call your mouthpiece ship-to-shore, we stuff you in a torpedo tube and blow you to Windsor. Why not take it easy on our lumbago and you can play hockey some other time?”
“The Gloria’s a minesweeper, not a destroyer. She ain’t got torpedo tubes. Okay, okay,” Orr said, when Canal set down his glass and started his way. “I just want you to understand I don’t run whores. The Kowalski dame kept her ear to the ground and told me when one of my joints had to stand for a raid. It gave me time to sacrifice a couple of slot machines and keep my best dealers out of the can.”
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 117