The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  McReary, sharing the back seat 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 flak 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 less 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 Vernors. 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.”

  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 GI.”

  “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 throw 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 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 GI 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 that 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 snot rag, 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 the gorge of 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 knife 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 had
n’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, 166 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.”