Detroit Is Our Beat

by Loren D. Estleman

  “He talk?” Zagreb waited. Canal’s stories didn’t always go anywhere.

  “Dillinger stuck up a bank in Ohio while they was toasting his tootsies. They let the poor schnook go in an ambulance. The barbershop smelled like a wienie roast, they said. What reminded them, we was eating hot dogs in the Coney Island. Hard guys.”

  “Senators are a lousy team,” Burke said.

  * * *

  Two hours passed, of which twenty minutes were diverting. Burke straddled a chair backward and practiced tossing his hat onto the clothes tree. Canal, his cigar gone cold again between his teeth, gave up on his puzzle and tuned the Philco to H.V. Kaltenborn for news from the front. Zagreb chain-smoked Chesterfields, correcting the grammar in arrest reports with a green fountain pen and checking the Wittnauer on his wrist from time to time. At three o’clock a call came in from the police in Warren and they put on their hats and drove to a beer garden across from the Chrysler tank plant to assist the locals in breaking up a brawl, employing blackjacks and a pool cue cut down to a handy length.

  “Be easier with Mac along,” said Burke during a lull in the action. “I miss his backhand.”

  On the way back they stopped at a call box. Canal hung up and got into the sedan beside Burke at the wheel, rubbing with his thumb at a spot of blood on his cuff. “Mac ain’t checked in yet.”

  Zagreb said, “Let’s swing over to the California.”

  “Suits me. Nazis and rednecks are like peanuts. Once you start beating on ’em, you can’t stop.”

  The residential hotel stood on Hastings, a squat building of tar-stained yellow brick where the 31st Michigan Infantry had stopped before boarding a train to Mexico to fight Pancho Villa in 1916. When the black Chrysler boated into the curb and the three plainclothesmen got out, a young black man in a lavender pinstripe suit tightened his grip on his female companion’s arm and they trotted down the block.

  The lobby smelled of stale cigarettes and spearmint gum. The trio nodded at the horse-faced clerk reading Sixgun Stories behind the desk and boarded an elevator operated by an ancient Negro in a bellhop’s uniform.

  “Where’s Hank?” Zagreb asked him.

  “VFW meeting, boss.”

  “Which war’d that be, eighteen-twelve?” asked Burke.

  The scent of DDT greeted them when the doors trundled open on the eleventh floor.

  McReary answered Zagreb’s knock. The young detective was in shirtsleeves with his hat pushed back from his glistening forehead. “I was just about to hunt up a phone.” He stood aside. The squad entered.

  Holinshead stood next to the only window, whose sash was propped open with a block of wood that belonged to the room. It did nothing to relieve the fug, but the FBI man looked fresh with his jacket buttoned and his tie knotted snugly. There were three other men present: one standing, one seated sideways in a straight wooden chair with his legs crossed and an arm resting on the back, the third stretched out on the bed.

  Both the man standing and the man sitting were jacketless, in suspenders with their ties hanging loose. The man in the chair was stocky and wore lizard skin boots, old but polished. The other was gaunt, with an Adam’s apple the size of a cue ball and a cigarette smoldering at a sixty-degree angle from the corner of his lips.

  Zagreb knew at once these weren’t the Arrow Collar men J. Edgar Hoover liked to parade before cameras, but two of the cowboys the Bureau employed to toughen its center—former Texas Rangers, peace officers from Arizona and Montana, and posse men who’d dispensed justice with a rope and a Winchester in the days of John Wesley Hardin, pickled since in brine and rye whiskey and as ageless as the single-action Colts on their belts. Their eyes were dead in faces burned deep brown.

  “Glad you could make it, Lieutenant. I don’t know if you’ve met Special Agents Neil Junkers and George Dial.” Holinshead swept a hand from the standing beanpole to the lunk in the chair.

  Canal said, “I have. Somebody else must be using the iron from the lobby.”

  Zagreb studied the man on the bed. He lay spread-eagled with wrists and ankles bound to the posts with twine, wearing nothing but a pair of BVDs soaked through with sweat or urine or both. The rest of what the lieutenant guessed were his clothes lay in a sodden heap on the floor. He looked to be in his early thirties, fair, with ribs that stuck out. One eye was swollen shut and his lower lip was split and bleeding and twice normal size. He was conscious, breathing heavily, but his open eye was opaque. The point of passing out was close.

  “Oh, and Alfred Schneider, the enemy.” The Special Agent in Charge sounded bored.

  “My name is Fred Taylor.”

  This information came in a mumble, with all the inflection pressed from it as if through constant repetition. The German accent was slight.

  “That’s the name you write on the back of your paycheck, just before you turn some of it over to the North American Aryan Alliance,” Holinshead said. “It always clears, but that’s between you and the bookkeepers at Packard.”

  “I told you I have never heard of the North—the North Aryan Alliance. You have—”

  Junkers, the gaunt one, took a step and backhanded him hard across the cheek. One of his big knobby knuckles split it open. Taylor made a choking noise and his body lost all tension.

  Dial, the stocky one, got up, scooped a pitcher off the grubby nightstand, and dashed water into the unconscious man’s face. Taylor groaned and his head rolled over, but both eyes remained closed.

  “Damn it, Neil, now we got to start all over again.”

  “So what, you got a date with Betty Grable?”

  “Here, kid, make yourself useful and fill this up.” Dial thrust the pitcher at McReary, who reached for it.

  Burke put a hand on McReary’s arm, stopping him. “Fetch it yourself,” he told Dial. “He ain’t your errand boy.”

  The stocky man looked Burke up and down. The city detective had three inches and twenty pounds on him, but for someone who had a little too much padding around the chest the agent seemed confident of whatever outcome this discussion might have. “Whoa there, hoss. I didn’t just bring any carrots with me.”

  Burke bunched his muscles. Zagreb inserted a shoulder between him and the G-man.

  “It won’t hurt to give the kraut a breather. He’s no good to you in a coma.”

  “Let him rest, Dial.”

  Dial nodded at his superior’s quiet command and sat back down, dangling an arm over the back of the chair.

  Holinshead regarded Zagreb mildly. “Don’t tell me you never bruised a knuckle on a stubborn suspect, Lieutenant.”

  “We usually leave enough to stand up at the arraignment. What’ve you got on Taylor?”

  “That’s classified.”

  “Huh. Snitch.” Canal lit a cigar and tossed the match on the floor.

  The FBI man nodded. “I can confirm that, without going into detail. Our informant identified Taylor as a contributor to the Alliance.”

  “Finger him in person?” Zagreb asked.

  “Too risky. He’s in deep.”

  “He just gave you the name Alfred Schneider, alias Fred Taylor? My grandmother spoke four languages; she taught me a little German. Schneider in English is tailor. He can’t be the only one who took that name when he came here.”

  “So far he’s the only one who’s turned up in a position to threaten our national interests.”

  Burke said, “He’s a grease monkey in an aircraft plant. There’s thousands of ’em.”

  “But only one Fred Taylor.”

  The lieutenant pierced his face with a Chesterfield and touched his Zippo to the end. The acrid stench of fear and bodily fluids from the man on the bed was oppressive.

  “A little random sabotage don’t call for a Special Agent in Charge; or are you trying to make an impression your first day?”

  “Even the smallest fish knows who leads the school. We offered him a pretty good deal if he’d give up some of his associates, but he turned us down. Isn’t that right,
Detective?”

  “They said they’d hold him for the duration, then deport him to Germany,” McReary said. “It was either that or life in Leavenworth. It wasn’t Beat the Band.”

  Canal asked, “Can’t you get those names from your rat in the Alliance?”

  “I didn’t say our informant was a member. In any case, our methods aren’t open to analysis outside the Bureau.”

  Junkers chuckled, his Adam’s apple doing the Lindy Hop in time with the cigarette that never left his lips. He kept his head cocked to one side to keep the smoke out of his eyes, but it appeared to have cured his weathered brown face like leather. So far he’d spoken only once, to ask Dial if he had a date with Betty Grable.

  Canal shifted his attention to him.

  “Hope you got the right man this time. I heard that barber you gave a hotfoot to had to close up shop. Can’t cut hair sitting down.”

  “We got Dillinger in the end, didn’t we?” The man’s southwestern accent was sharp enough to cut barbed wire.

  “Well, sure. You couldn’t miss him once you ran out of barbers.”

  Taylor groaned again and muttered something in German. He was coming around.

  Holinshead glanced from him to Zagreb. “You can file any grievances with the Director in Washington. Meanwhile our boys are dying while we’re losing the war at home.”

  “Put it on a poster.” Zagreb looked at his men and jerked his head toward the door. The squad left.

  * * *

  That night, responding to an anonymous tip, the Four Horsemen staked out a machine-tool warehouse on Orleans near the river, where an exchange of black market tires for cash was expected. Before leaving 1300, Zagreb called the personnel department at the Packard plant, where a female clerk agreed to look up Fred Taylor’s employee file and report back.

  The tip turned out to be a dud. When the squad returned to clock out two hours later, the sergeant at the desk handed Zagreb a message.

  “What do you mean it’s missing?” demanded the lieutenant over the wire the next day. No one had answered the night before.

  “That’s not exactly true.” This voice was male, and wearily patient. “The person you spoke to last night couldn’t find it because it wasn’t there. I gave it to the FBI yesterday, a man named Holinshead.”

  “He show you a court order?”

  “I didn’t think he needed one. There’s a war on, you know.”

  Zagreb’s knuckles whitened on the receiver, but he kept his tone even.

  “Who’s foreman on Taylor’s shift?”

  There was a pause. Metal scraped against metal, paper rustled. The man’s voice came back on. “Orville Sack, but he’s busy on the line. He’s on the eleven A.M. rotation for lunch.”

  The Packard plant sprawled on East Grand at Mt. Elliott, as palatial and orderly as it had appeared on Albert Kahn’s drawing board forty years before. Directed by an employee, Zagreb clanked a tin lunch pail onto the cafeteria table opposite where Orville Sack sat munching an egg-salad sandwich. “Swap you a Baby Ruth for your apple.”

  The foreman looked up with his mouth full, first at the stranger, then at the gold shield in his palm. He had thin, ginger-colored hair and an expression that seemed resigned to any sort of tragedy. Zagreb wondered if his acquaintances called him Sad Sack.

  Sack chewed and swallowed. “Nobody offers a trade like that.”

  Zagreb opened the pail and set the candy bar in its bright wrapper in front of the foreman. Then he sat down facing him.

  “Where’d you get the points for an egg sandwich?”

  “I didn’t. It’s powdered. I got a nephew in the navy.”

  “Good for you. Fred Taylor.”

  “Uh-uh.” Sack pushed away the Baby Ruth. “Bad enough you took one of my hardest workers off the line. I won’t put him in worse Dutch over no dessert.”

  “I’m not federal. I’m trying to find out why they’re interested in him.”

  “Beats me. He’s a good Joe for a kraut. He usually sits right where you’re sitting, telling me how much he loves this country and how he wouldn’t go back to Germany if they made him Reichsfuhrer, whatever the hell that is.”

  “He wouldn’t be a very good spy if he didn’t say that.”

  “If he’s a spy, I’m Mata Hari. He hates Hitler more than Churchill does. His girl’s Jewish, for God’s sake.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Molly something-or-other. She’s a secretary in the Fisher Building, he said. She was a campaign volunteer for FDR in nineteen forty. I guess that makes her a regular Axis Sally. You sure about the Baby Ruth?”

  “Go ahead. Sugar hurts my teeth.” Zagreb accepted Sack’s apple, a McIntosh with a brown spot. “Where’s Molly work in the Fisher?” He bit into it.

  Sack shrugged, peeling down the candy bar wrapper like a banana skin. “I need Fred on the line. The dames are okay, but they don’t come here Rosie the Riveter; that takes training. These krauts got machine oil in their veins. They held a monkey wrench before they could pick up a spoon. Henry Ford ought to hire Krupp away from Berlin if he wants to win this war.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. About Taylor, not Krupp. Henry don’t return my calls.”

  “If Fred’s a spy, I’m Sergeant York.”

  “You’ve got your wars mixed up. We’re fighting Nazis, not the Kaiser.”

  “I got no beef with either of ’em. My nephew’s in New Zealand. All I want to do is make quota. I can’t do that if I got to train somebody from scratch every day ’cause somebody on the line don’t talk American as good as me.”

  Zagreb asked a few more questions, but got nothing more he could use. He threw his apple core into a trash bin, went back to headquarters, and put the lunch pail on the desk Burke was using. “Hey, I been looking for that.” The officer undid the catches.

  “Eat while you work. I need you and Mac to call every office in the Fisher Building and ask if they’ve got a woman named Molly working there. She’s Taylor’s girl.”

  “We investigating Taylor now?” McReary had a game of double solitaire going on a pair of desks left vacant by a sergeant training at Fort Bragg and a detective first-grade missing in action in the Pacific.

  “We’re investigating Holinshead.”

  McReary looked up from his cards and Burke looked up from his lunch pail. Canal, smoking a cigar near the open window assigned to him on such occasions, grinned around the stump.

  “That don’t leave this room,” said the lieutenant. “The commissioner thinks J. Edgar Hoover shit the moon.”

  “The commissioner thinks we should be storming a beach somewhere.” Burke scratched his chin, making a sound like a snow shovel scraping concrete. “I thought we was supposed to be all in this together: Us versus Them.”

  “That’s what they say to sell war bonds. Holinshead’s working on some gripe of his own. Even a flag-waving nut takes a coffee break now and then.”

  “Maybe he’s got a bet down on the enemy,” Canal said.

  McReary shuffled the pasteboards back into the deck. “I always knew I’d wind up in dog tags. Who’s got the Yellow Pages?” He began opening and closing drawers.

  “Here.” Burke tore the directory in two and handed him half.

  Canal asked Zagreb what he wanted him to do.

  “Hop over to the hotel and find out if Taylor’s still breathing. Pick up a sack of burgers on the way, just in case he is. I doubt those bastards have been feeding him.”

  “What if they don’t like it?”

  “That’s why I’m sending you.”

  The sergeant grinned wider, tossed his cigar out the window, and buttoned his jacket around his barrel torso. Whistling, he rolled on out.

  “I bet they stick me in a submarine.” McReary planted a finger on the page in front of him and picked up a receiver. “I get claustrophobic just putting on a vest.”

  “I heard they feed you good in them tin cans,” Burke said.

  “That’s just for ballast when
the depth charges start dropping.”

  “You’re dreaming, both of you,” Zagreb said. “It’s the infantry for us all if we blow this.”

  Burke stared into his pail. “Where the hell’s my Baby Ruth?”

  * * *

  They found Molly Wenk in the mailroom of an insurance underwriter on the Fisher’s fourteenth floor, putting letters and reports in tin canisters and poking them into rows of pneumatic tubes connected to the various offices. Her best asset was her auburn hair, which she wore in a shoulder bob, Andrews Sisters style. She had sharp, rodentlike features and spoke in a harsh New York accent that Zagreb had heard previously only in Patsy Kelly movies.

  She found someone to spell her and accompanied the lieutenant and McReary to a coffee shop on the ground floor. Zagreb had left Burke behind to answer the phones on the theory that a single woman in her late twenties might find the younger officers’ presence less daunting. He determined quickly that Miss Wenk wouldn’t be daunted by anything this side of a German .88.

  “I ain’t heard from Fred in a couple of days.” She tapped a Camel on the back of a pigskin cigarette case and set fire to it from a book of matches in an ashtray before Zagreb could get out his Zippo. “I thought maybe the five o’clock whistle didn’t blow; you know, like in the song.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Zagreb said. “I got a tin ear. Known him long?”

  “He was the first person I met when I came here on the bus. I was schlepping this huge suitcase, looking for a cab, when suddenly somebody jerks it out of my hand. Well, I’m a Brooklyn girl. I kicked him in the nuts.”

  McReary said, “Jesus. This guy was born under a bum star.”

  Zagreb glared him into silence.

  “Turns out he was just trying to give me a hand,” Molly said. “He carried the suitcase to a streetcar stop and told me how I could get to my friend’s address where I was staying without having to transfer. Next day he showed up at the door with a bunch of flowers. I’d’ve thought he was a real smooth operator, except his English was all mixed up. He was cute. We go out to dinner and a movie sometimes. I wouldn’t call him my boyfriend, exactly. All he ever done was kiss me on the cheek. What kind of a girl do you think I am?”