Zagreb said, “She was your department pipeline?”
“Double agent.” Canal spat a soggy piece of tobacco into an ice bucket. “You’re saying my snitch was two-timing me with the mob and the whole damn Vice Squad?”
“Not the whole squad; just Sergeant Coopersmith. He pinched her in front of God and everybody whenever he wanted scuttlebutt from the street, and after she made bail she slipped me what she overheard at headquarters. I never paid for nothing else, and if she put out for Coop or didn’t, she never said boo either way.
“So you can see I had as much to lose as anybody when she opened her door to that butcher,” he finished.
“Not as much as her.” McReary’s straw gurgled. He got rid of the ginger ale bottle. “When’d you see her last?”
“The night before her roommate found her gutted like a goose. I asked her wasn’t it about time the cops swept her off the street again and she said, ‘Right after I do my part for the boys in the service.’ ”
“What’d she mean by that?” Zagreb asked.
Capped teeth flashed white in the gangster’s olive-hued face. “I’m just guessing, but I don’t think she was planning to serve coffee and doughnuts at the USO.”
Zagreb studied him over his half-raised drink. “On the level, she took a serviceman back to her room that night?”
“Bette made Kate Smith look like Tokyo Rose. She bought bonds, donated to the scrap drive, and offered a discount every time she sat under the apple tree with a G.I.”
“Thanks, Frankie,” the lieutenant said. “Just to show our heart’s in the right place, we’ll forget about that shipment of kangaroo meat on its way to Wyandotte. We’ll even thrown in whatever you got stashed in their pouches.”
Orr flushed high on his cheekbones. “How the hell—? Oh,” he said, resuming his customary calm. “I hope you boys don’t bury her on Zug Island with the other unclaimed stiffs. That was a doozy of a going-away present she gave you.”
Back on deck, Burke returned the Thompson to Rocks. “Next time take the safety off, mug. Them underwater Krauts never put theirs on.”
—
Back at 1300, Burke poured two fingers of Four Roses into a Dixie cup. “I ain’t George M. Cohan, but nobody’s going to sell me one of our troops is slashing hookers.”
McReary gave up on the book he was studying. “One of the theories about the Ripper was he served in India or Afghanistan. Hand-to-hand combat can do things to a man.”
Canal said, “Seems to me we paid this bill off last July during the riots. Two nutcase killers in one year?”
McReary said, “This is different. That screwball Kilroy thought he was helping the war effort by slicing up ration-stamp hoarders. He only wore a uniform to get in the door.”
“I’d buy that this time around, too. The Quartermaster’s Corps has got too much on its hands to keep track of what happens to its laundry.”
The lieutenant was restless. He’d tried sitting and straddling a number of vacant chairs like Goldilocks and wound up pacing the squad room chain-smoking Chesterfields. “We’re wasting time trying to talk ourselves out of thinking he’s a G.I. when we ought to be considering what if he is. Ox told us it’d been six weeks since the first two killings. Don’t that suggest something?”
“He’s on a cycle, like I said,” McReary reminded him. “We just got to—” He looked up, color flooding his face.
Zagreb nodded. “Basic training’s six weeks. Suppose he threw himself a little call-up party, or enlisted before the investigation turned on him. Now he’s out on leave.”
Canal, fogging the outside air with one of his nickel stogies, slid off the windowsill. Plaster fell from the ceiling when his clodhoppers hit the floor. “We need a date on that second killing, then call the War Department to see who signed up in any of the services during the next month.”
“Six weeks,” Zagreb said, “to be sure. You take it.”
“Give that to the kid, Zag. He’s good on the horn.”
“He’s better with girls his age. Mac, you’re going back to talk to the roommate, and if you come out without a line on just what uniform Bette’s last john had on, you got about as much chance of making sergeant as Sad Sack.”
“But she said she didn’t see anything.”
“That’s what she thinks. We need to narrow the suspects to one branch of the service. If this son of a bitch ships out before we ID him, he’ll be spilling civilian blood all over Europe and the Philippines.”
—
The roommate’s name was Jill Wheeler. Her landlady told McReary she was working, but that she usually returned home just after the five o’clock whistle.
Waiting for her at the bus stop on the corner, he caught himself humming “The Five O’Clock Whistle Never Blew.” He liked jive music okay, but the way the lyrics wormed their way into his brain shoved out everything important.
She alighted behind a stout woman in a babushka and woolen topcoat that made his own skin prickle in the heat, a dead duck swinging by its neck in one fist; Polish-populated Hamtramck was still the best place to procure quality poultry under rationing. By contrast, Jill Wheeler looked as fresh as Deanna Durbin. Her round face with its clear complexion, black hair cut in a bob, brimmed hat, summer dress, and chunky heels made a refreshing change from the world represented by her dead roommate.
She stopped before the man touching his hat, gripping her handbag tightly. “I know you.”
He introduced himself, steeling himself for the back-and-forth: “One or two more questions.”
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
“Just for the record, miss.”
With that behind them, he escorted her back to her room. There, with the door left open to appease the landlady, she assured him repeatedly she knew nothing about Bette Kowalski’s last rendezvous. (She actually used the word; he suspected she’d sat through Algiers at least twice.) At length he turned toward the door, putting on his hat. Taking it off in a young lady’s presence to expose his bare scalp had been a major contribution to the cause of justice. “If you remember anything else, please call me at headquarters. Daniel J. McReary, Detective Third Grade.”
“I can’t think what that would be. All I know is she said she hoped she’d make some dogface wag its tail.”
He paused in the midst of smoothing the brim. “When’d she say that?”
“I don’t know; just before I left for my shift, I suppose. Yes, I was on my way out the door. Is it important?”
“Probably not. But thank you.” Lieutenant Zagreb had told him again and again never to let a witness know she’d put you on to something good. “Otherwise they’ll start making things up just to get you to pat ’em on the head.”
—
The fog didn’t roll, didn’t creep; the poets who wrote that had never visited London in the autumn. It spread like sludge from the harbor, yellow as piss and soggy as a snotrag, so thick round your ankles you swore you’d stepped into a bucket of dead squid. On the cobblestone streets, sound carried through it as across a lake; the poets were dead wrong about that as well, claiming it muffled noise when in fact Big Ben’s iron bell rang from a mile down the Thames fit to burst your eardrums.
Example: the squeak of a hinge, and a gush of tinny music, cut short abruptly by the clap of a door shutting against it, then the sole of a shoe scraping the pavement, sounding as close as if it were his own, but sharper; a narrow heel attached to a small foot, a fact confirmed by a puff of cheap scent. A woman, and one who doused herself, advertising her availability like a cat in heat. He felt blood rising to his face; but he suppressed his rage, or more accurately channeled it toward the business at hand. He stepped from the doorway neighboring the public-house, the fumes of ale and vomit and urine mingling with the fog as he passed the hellish place, fixing his gaze on snatches of tawdry satin and dyed feathers glimpsed between wisps of mist, but relying as fully on smell and sound; groping, as he closed the distance, for the handle of the kni
fe on his belt….
—
McReary started awake. Having found Zagreb absent, he’d sat at the desk he’d commandeered for his studies to wait, and didn’t know he’d drifted off until the squad room door closed, shaking him out of his dream.
“You’re an angel when you sleep.” The lieutenant sat on a corner of the desk unoccupied by books and hung a cigarette on his lower lip. “You know, studying all night every night’s no good if you doze off during the test.”
“Sorry, L.T. I got something from the roommate.”
“Too soon. Probably just a bladder infection.”
“What? Oh.” He blushed. “Does the ribbing stop when I make sergeant?”
“Not unless we bring in a kid younger than you. What’d you get?”
“Just something that came out when I’d finished asking questions.” He told him what Jill Wheeler had said.
“Sure you heard her right?”
“Sure I’m sure. Think it’s anything?”
Canal came in just then and read their faces. “We take Berlin?”
“Close. The Kowalski dame as much as told her roommate her john was a dogface.”
“That’s army, ain’t it?”
“I think so. Don’t Burke have a brother or something in the army?”
“Brother-in-law,” said Burke, entering. “Dumb as a box of Lux. He’s a cinch to make general.”
“Ship out yet?”
“I wish. Dumb cluck’s still parking on my couch.”
“Ring him up.”
The detective snatched up a candlestick phone and dialed. “Me, Sadie. Roy in? Imagine that. Put him on. No, I’m not looking to bust his butt, just ask him a question. Well, sure I have. Didn’t I ask him just this morning when’s he going to start paying rent?” He pressed the mouthpiece to his chest. “I tell you, if I hadn’t knocked her up—Roy?” He leaned forward. “You ever hear anyone in basic call a guy with the navy or marines a dogface?” He listened. “Okay.” He pegged the earpiece. “Sailors are gobs, marines leathernecks or jarheads. Dogfaces are army buck privates. Always.”
“Gimme that phone.” Zagreb asked the long-distance operator for the War Department. While he was waiting, McReary said, “L.T., what’s it mean when a cop dreams he’s a perp?”
“It means he’s got the makings of a good detective.”
—
The news from Washington was disheartening at first. During the six weeks following the murder of Maria Zogu, the second victim, one hundred sixty-six men were recruited into the army from the Detroit area. Many phone calls later determined the following:
Thirty-four with the paratroopers had been shipped overseas directly after basic training, that service having suffered heavy casualties during the push toward Germany.
Twenty-three were discharged for unfitness or insubordination.
Sixteen of those were tracked down and their movements accounted for the night Bette Kowalski was murdered.
The remaining seven were interviewed and eliminated as likely suspects.
Three died during training, one from incaution during a drill involving live rounds, one from cerebral hemorrhage after a brawl in the PX, one from Spanish influenza.
Eighteen soldiers who’d been exposed to the stricken man were in quarantine at the time of the last murder.
The squad tabled six who supplied sound alibis for at least one of the first two killings.
Little by little, with help from Osprey’s Homicide detail, the uniform division, and reserves, most of the eighty-plus men left fell away, leaving just four; a handy number for the Four Horsemen to interview separately.
“What we got?” Zagreb asked when they reunited at 1300.
Canal passed an unlit cigar under his nose and made the same face the others usually made when he lit one. “My guy’s eighteen going on eleven. Tried every whistle-stop between here and his hometown in Texas before he found a recruiting sergeant blind enough to accept the date of birth he gave. He’s a shrimp. Bette had muscles on her muscles from pounding the pavement and smacking around deadbeats. She’d’ve took him three falls out of three.”
Burke said, “Mine took a swing at me when I told him what I was looking into. I knocked him flat, frisked him and the dump he lives in. If he’s our guy, he sure cleans up after himself. He’s in holding downstairs.”
“We’ll take turns,” Zagreb said. “Mac?”
McReary got out his notebook. “Lives in Dearborn. With his mother, the landlord says. Both out; she cooks in the bomber plant in Willow Run, gets off at midnight. My guess is he’s sowing some oats before he ships out. The landlord wouldn’t let me check out the apartment. Should we get a warrant?”
“Not yet.” Zagreb looked at his watch. “Twenty to twelve. We’ll try schmoozing Mom when she comes home.”
“What about yours, Zag?” Canal asked.
“Halfway to Honolulu on a troop ship. If we turn anything up on a search warrant we can tip off the M.P.s, though I’d sure hate to dump it in somebody else’s lap.”
Burke grinned at McReary. “Slap on the Old Spice, Junior. If you can Romeo a jane like Bette’s roomie, the old lady on Dearborn’s a fish in a barrel.”
—
“Mrs. Corbett?” Zagreb took off his hat.
“Miss. I went back to my maiden name after my husband left me. For a tramp,” she added, pinching her nostrils.
The woman who’d opened the door had a slight middle-aged spread, but was still attractive. A lock of strawberry-blonde hair had strayed from the red bandanna she wore tied around her head. The lieutenant had to admit she resembled Rosie the Riveter, even if her skills with a stove surpassed those with a jackhammer. She smelled not unpleasantly of hot grease.
After the pleasantries, she let the squad into a tidy living room with a fake fireplace above which hung a period photograph in a matted frame of a man in his thirties who parted his hair in the middle and wore a trim moustache.
“My great-great uncle Boston,” she said. “He’s the man who shot John Wilkes Booth.”
Zagreb nodded. “Good for him. Lincoln’s my favorite president.”
As the others took seats on slightly worn mohair cushions, their lieutenant went through all the motions, assuring their hostess that her son wasn’t in trouble, just that they wanted to speak with him in connection with an investigation.
“Leonard should be back any time,” she said. “He’s to report for duty at eight A.M. By this time next week he’ll be in England. I’m hoping he’ll find the time to visit family. His great-great-great uncle was born there.” The cheerful glitter in her pale-brown eyes fell short of dissembling the concern behind them.
McReary noted it. “He’s your only child?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m sure he’ll be especially careful.”
“You’re very kind.”
Burke, not kind, asked if she knew where Leonard was on the night of the date Bette Kowalski was killed.
“Was it a weeknight?”
“Wednesday.” Zagreb cut his eyes Burke’s way, registering disapproval.
“I wouldn’t know, then. I’d have been at work. He may have stayed home, or he may have gone out for a beer with friends. That’s what he went out for tonight: He’s throwing himself a sort of going-away party.” Once again concern clouded the glitter in her eyes.
Canal fumbled at the pocket containing his cigars, but refrained from taking one out. “Could we see his room?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He’s a very private person. He won’t even let me go in to clean.”
“We won’t disturb anything.” McReary looked sincere.
“I’m afraid he keeps it locked.”
“No problem, ma’am.” Canal took out a small leather case, displaying a collection of picks and skeleton keys.
The room was upstairs, with a yellow tin sign tacked to the door reading:
FIRING RANGE
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
Mrs. Corbett�
�s smile was nervous. “Leonard’s little joke. He bought it in the army surplus store. He’s always bringing home odd bits.”
Five minutes, three keys, and two picks later, the sergeant got off his knees and twisted the knob. Artfully the four men arranged themselves between the woman and the door and drew their revolvers, shielding the maneuver from her line of sight with their bodies. They sprang in single-file and spread out inside the room; holstered their weapons when it proved to be unoccupied.
“Holy—”
“—Mackerel,” Zagreb interrupted Burke.
It was a small room with a single bed, a writing table, and a wooden chair. A Class-A army uniform in an open dry cleaner’s bag hung in a closet without a door. A metal bookrack beside the desk contained rows of worn books: The Lodger, The Curse of Mitre Square, several titled Jack the Ripper. A corkboard mounted above the table was plastered with black-and-white and sepia photographs, most of them clipped from newspapers and magazines, showing narrow cobblestone alleys, a stately building captioned New Scotland Yard, and shots taken from dozens of angles of obviously dead women, some of them naked, exposing ghastly slashes imperfectly stitched.
Mrs. Corbett gasped in the hallway. Zagreb jerked his chin at Canal, standing nearest the door. He eased it shut and leaned his back against it.
“I’ve seen these,” McReary said. “There’s Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, Elizabeth Stride.” He indicated the grisliest image of all, a skilled artist’s sketch. “Mary Kelly, the Ripper’s last known victim. Ring a bell?”
“He cut up Bette Kowalski the same way,” Canal said.
A black satchel, like the kind doctors carried, stood open on the table. It was old and cracked. Zagreb reached inside and began taking out the contents: stethoscope, glass medicine bottles, scalpels, a gadget resembling a brace-and-bit; what some people called a hand drill. He held up the last item. “You’re the big reader, Mac. This looks like it belongs in a carpenter’s tool box.”
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 118