Detroit Is Our Beat

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Well, they ain’t the cavalry, but let our mug try busting through this bunch.” Canal sounded relieved.

  Zagreb said, “You know the navy. What’s ‘dress white’ mean?”

  “Hell, it’s the uniform of the day; everybody knows that.”

  “Why’s this one in blue?”

  A sailor who’d been standing apart from the group lunged between Canal and Burke, sliding a hand inside Sinatra’s dinner jacket as his other came out of his blue blouse with a shrill tearing sound.

  Canal clubbed him with an elbow while Burke clamped down on his wrist. The hand attached to the wrist sprang open and the object in it bounced off Zagreb’s knee and struck his toe, sending a bolt of pain to his ankle. It was lead, all right.

  Cursing, he snatched the envelope from the sailor’s other hand and shoved him off his feet. He stuck the envelope back inside Sinatra’s jacket.

  McReary and Zagreb let go of the singer to help Canal and Burke hoist the sailor to his feet. Sinatra turned immediately to sign a piece of paper one of the men in white was holding.

  “This for you, pal, or you trying to get in good with some dame?”

  * * *

  “I’d look spiffy in one of those sailor suits.” Sinatra played with his Jack on the rocks. “In a movie, I mean; I’ve had offers. I tried to join. Sometimes I think I should carry around a sign saying it.”

  Burke said, “I’m Four-F myself. Colorblind, as if I couldn’t tell a nip or a Jerry from just his uniform.”

  The two touched glasses.

  They were all back in the Lafayette Bar. The Greek band was between sets, giving them the chance to talk without shouting. Zagreb was looking at his notebook.

  “Morty Tilson, not affiliated with the U.S. Navy or any other branch of the armed services. He was catching in a pickup ballgame when the ball bounced off the plate and hit him in the throat. He’d signed to sing with Benny Goodman; now he can’t even get in the military. Hoboken boy. Your story could’ve been his.”

  “I don’t know him. Hell with him.” Sinatra signaled the bartender for another round. “I could forgive him for the pipe; everyone gets jealous. He had to have the cash too.”

  McReary said, “He needed it for the black market. Driving from New Jersey to Detroit burns a lot of gas.”

  The bartender, a brick-colored Mediterranean with a brow like a spacebar across both eyes, set down the drinks and asked Mr. Sinatra if he might indulge his customers in a song. He rolled his head toward a bright young thing seated at the bar, smiling at him over a bare shoulder. Her swarthy escort glowered at him over his padded one.

  The singer shook his head. “Put their drinks on my tab.”

  Burke asked Canal what the hell he was playing with. It was making him edgy.

  The sergeant unwound the flexible silver square from a thick index finger and showed it to him. It was torn on one side.

  “It’s what Tilson used to stick the pipe to his chest. Lab monkeys have the rest. Duct tape, it’s called. The flyboys in the navy and air corps use it to patch the hydraulic cylinders on planes. Holds better’n Scotch tape, especially to skin. I guess he got it from the same guy who gave him the uniform.”

  “He’ll tell us about that too. It might mean the difference between one-to-three and five-to-seven in the Jackson pen.” Zagreb pointed his beer bottle at Sinatra. “You owe us a story. You don’t have to sing it.”

  The singer lit a Camel off a pigskin lighter and blew twin strands out his nostrils.

  “You earned it, with or without accompaniment. Yeah, I was born dead; bluer than Tilson’s shirt. I weighed thirteen and a half pounds, can you believe it, a rake like me? The doctor jerked me out any old way to save my mother from bleeding to death. My grandmother scooped me up and dunked me in a sink full of cold water and I started yelling. My first solo.”

  “No wonder you pay to even the odds,” McReary said after a moment. “You started out a strike behind.”

  Burke said, “I got three nipples.”

  Quiet settled over the table.

  “What I mean,” he said, turning red, “everybody’s got something.”

  Sinatra smiled his brittle smile. “Sure you’re not counting your dick?”

  Burke colored all the way to his fingertips.

  When the laughter faded, the singer lifted his glass to his chin. “So I guess I am funny.”

  “Just sing, Frank,” Zagreb said.

  Death

  — WITHOUT —

  Parole

  “You guys ever ashamed you’re a cop?”

  Death Without Parole

  Canal said, “Friday,” and sat back as if he’d predicted the day Hitler would surrender. A jet of smoke shot diagonally from the corner of his mouth opposite the one where he’d parked his cigar.

  “Sucker bet,” Lieutenant Zagreb said. “He doesn’t get out till tomorrow—that’s Thursday—and that’s confidential to the squad. You’ve got to allow time for shock to set in. Action comes later.”

  “Not if one of us does it.” Burke spat on his iron. It sizzled and released a cloud of steam into the general exhaust in the room.

  Zagreb shook his head, waggling a finger. “That’s cheating. Monday, at the earliest. Who wants to work the weekend?”

  “I feel like I came in on the middle of the feature,” McReary said. “I got no idea what you fellas are talking about.”

  “Office pool. That thing’s too hot, Burksie,” Zagreb told the man with the iron. “You want the cotton setting.”

  “Shows how much you know for a lieutenant. It’s rayon.” Burke snatched his shirt off the ironing board and showed him the label. He was the hairiest man on the squad. In his BVD undershirt he looked like a grizzly wearing a white vest.

  “Even worse. You’ll set it on fire and burn down the joint.”

  The California Hotel, deep in the heart of Detroit’s Negro district, had opened soon after The Birth of a Nation, to capitalize on the public’s sudden fascination with Hollywood. The potted palm in the lobby had been dead for nine years and the flies in the ceiling fixtures a few months longer. The city Racket Squad used Room 1102 for discussions of sensitive material, unofficial interrogations, and in Detective Burke’s case, assignations with women not his wife. He was preparing for one at present, which explained the operation involving the shirt.

  “A fin still says Friday. I’m a cockeyed optimist.” Canal relit his cigar, which promptly went out again. The brand he smoked was made by Jackson Prison inmates who mixed tobacco with steel shavings from the machine shop.

  McReary, the youngest and lowest-ranking member of the squad, nudged his hat to the back of his head, exposing his prematurely bald scalp. “What pool? The Series don’t start for a week.”

  “Screw the Series. Bunch of Four-F shirking bums.” Burke pressed the iron to the collar of the rayon shirt, scorching it. Zagreb snickered.

  Canal said, “We’re betting on what day a cop knocks off Eddie Karpalov.”

  “Who’s Eddie Karpalov?”

  “Before your time, rook.” Zagreb slid a mug card out of his suit coat hanging on a chair and handed it to him.

  McReary looked at Edward Illyich Karpalov in front and profile, swarthy and hollow-cheeked, with no more expression than a bucket of sand. “Says here he killed a cop. What’s he doing out?”

  “Judge at his second trial said the cop wasn’t a cop because he failed to identify himself as a cop,” Zagreb said. “So when Eddie charged out of that savings and loan with the alarm clanging and shot the first guy came at him with a gun it was self-defense.”

  “I may take a crack at him myself.” McReary gave back the card.

  “Better step on it. He goes back to Russia soon as they process him out of County.” Burke shrugged into the shirt and turned up the collar, hiding the burn mark. “Whaddya think?”

  Canal said, “You look just like Cary Grant after a bad accident.”

  “This ain’t worth it. I might as well go home
to Sadie.”

  “Not tonight,” said the sergeant. “I’m taking her out dancing.”

  McReary said, “Card says Karpalov ran with the Purple Gang. I didn’t know those boys messed with banks.”

  Zagreb yawned; he hadn’t slept eight hours at a stretch since Pearl Harbor. “They didn’t, until Prohibition was repealed. The demand for bathtub gin and guns-for-hire dropped off sharp. What was he going to do, go straight?”

  Sergeant Canal got off the bed to throw the dead stogie out the window. He and Burke were the biggest men on a force that didn’t employ officers much below six feet, or didn’t until the draft came along and cut the department in half. But Burke didn’t look big when Canal stood up. Zagreb kidded the sergeant that the only reason he made plainclothes was they couldn’t find a uniform his size. “State Department’s shipping him home as an undesirable. I know a shorter word means the same thing.”

  “Since when do we deport people in wartime?”

  “Since we hooked up with Uncle Joe,” said the lieutenant. “Maybe he’ll slap a helmet on him and send him to the Eastern Front.”

  “Where I’ll personally pin the Iron Cross on the kraut that nails him.” Burke fastened the spoiled collar and put on a necktie with a cannibal painted on it. Canal blew him a kiss. He glowered back.

  McReary said, “When they start a pool on the judge, count me in.”

  “They did, down at the Tenth,” Canal said. “I got Sunday.”

  The young detective stripped the foil off a stick of bubble gum, read the little comic strip that came with it, and chewed. He was the only one of the famous Four Horsemen (“famous” in the News, “notorious” in the Free Press; the Times was on the fence) who didn’t smoke. “So much for the feds. What’s our end?”

  “We get to put him on the train,” Zagreb said. “That’s how come we’re sitting around the presidential suite, waiting to hear time of release. The marshals will meet us at Michigan Central and see the undesirable putz off on the boat in New York.”

  “‘Putz’ wasn’t the word I had in mind,” said Canal.

  “I know, but there’s a child present.”

  “You crumbs.” McReary blew a bubble.

  The phone rang, an old-fashioned candlestick. The lieutenant picked it up, put the receiver to his ear, and dangled the standard by its hook from the same hand. “Racket Squad, Zagreb. Yeah. Ants in his pants, hey? Okey-doke.” He hung up and held the phone in his lap. “Twelve-oh-one ayem. Chief turnkey wants him gone pronto. Sorry about your evening, Burksie.”

  “I can do what I need by ten.” Burke leered.

  “Provided you start by nine-fifty-eight.” Canal grinned.

  Zagreb thrust the telephone at Burke. “Give her a rain check. We may need that nervous energy later.”

  “Okay, L.T., but you and the boys don’t listen in. It tears me up when a dame starts crying.” He took the instrument and got the switchboard downstairs.

  Canal, who never wore a watch, took hold of McReary’s wrist and read his watch. “So what do we do for six hours?”

  The lieutenant took a deck of cards out of the drawer in the nightstand and shuffled. “Maybe Burke’ll get lucky and win a new shirt.”

  * * *

  “Looks just like his picture, don’t he?” McReary said.

  Burke nodded. “Them shutterbugs in Records are the best in the business. I never laid eyes on Rita Hayworth, but I bet she looks less Rita Hayworthy in the flesh than on the wall in Canal’s toilet.”

  “Shows how much you know, smart guy. Toilet’s down the hall. I share it with the whole third floor.”

  The chipped Bakelite radio in Admissions—bound with air corps–issue duct tape and stenciled PROPERTY OF WAYNE COUNTY JAIL—was playing Arthur Godfrey, a repeat broadcast; most of the talent was in the USO with Jolson. They watched Zagreb swap manacles with a sheriff’s deputy, officially assuming custody of Edward Illyich Karpalov, a.k.a. Eddie the Carp and a host of other names: former bootlegger, ex–bank robber, and cop-killer for all time.

  “What do we call this guy?” McReary asked. “He’s got more aliases than—”

  “—Clara Bow’s got crabs,” finished Canal.

  “Who’s Clara Bow?”

  Burke and Canal spoke together. “Before your time, rook.”

  “Movie star, I bet. Don’t you guys ever go to a ballgame?”

  Burke scowled. “Bunch of Four-F shirking—”

  “So what do we call him?”

  “How about DOA?” Canal unholstered his .38, spun the cylinder, and put it back.

  McReary was right. The man in the two-hundred-dollar suit—wrinkled from long storage—was as cadaverous and swarthy under his prison pallor as he looked in his picture. It took a photographer of uncommon skill to capture his absolute absence of expression without erasing his features altogether.

  If only his vocabulary were as bland as his face.

  “What’s with the bracelets? I’m an innocent man, judge said.” He had a thin voice with a cellblock rasp.

  “Wear ’em while you can, Eddie,” Zagreb said. “I still owe two payments.”

  “I hope you birds got me a lower berth. Riding in trains makes me puke.”

  Zagreb said, “We took up a collection and bought you a first-class compartment. Otherwise the marshals won’t know where the puke left off and you started.”

  “Go ahead, crack wise. I’m gonna get me the best lawyer in Rooshia and sue all you flatfeet for false imprisonment, clear up to J. Edgar. Come back home on the Queen Mary.”

  “Drop us a card before you board. We’ll tell the U-boats you’re on the way. There must be one commander with a brother walking a beat in Berlin.” Zagreb, cuffed to him by the wrists, nearly jerked his arm out of its socket heading for the exit.

  When they were all in the Chrysler, Karpalov sandwiched in the back seat between McReary and the lieutenant, Canal riding shotgun—literally, with a twelve-gauge across his lap—Burke stomped on the starter and threw in the clutch, stripping the gears. He was a better driver than that, but he hated the car. “I had a Russian lawyer once,” he said. “My first wife got the house and the dog and I got half a carton of cigarettes.”

  “Chesterfields, I hope.” Zagreb lit one one-handed.

  “No dice. One of them injun reservation brands, they don’t charge tax. But I got no beef. That damn dog ate a good pair of Florsheims.”

  “How would I know how things are over there?” Karpalov said. “I was in diapers when I left.”

  “Shoot a cop in Moscow, you’ll be in diapers when you get out.” Canal blew cigar smoke over the back of the seat, gassing McReary also. He opened a window.

  Burke said, “Wrong. They walk you down a hall in Lubyanka, only you don’t get to the end of the hall. Say what you like about the commies, they don’t have the storage problem we have here.”

  “Wiseacres. I imagine they got a black market there too. I’ll make a killing.”

  “Poor word choice.” Zagreb jerked up his arm, splitting the prisoner’s lip with the edge of his own handcuff.

  “Cripes!” He threw his free hand to his mouth, smearing blood. “You guys are supposed to deliver me in one piece!”

  The lieutenant took out a document printed on heavy stock and passed it across to McReary. “Read me the part where it says we got to.”

  McReary handed it back without unfolding it, grazing Karpalov’s mouth on the way; he sucked in breath sharply through his teeth. “It don’t say.”

  They had their choice of parking spaces by the great gaunt brick barn of the Michigan Central Depot, another structure predating women’s suffrage. “Sure the trains run this late?” Karpalov kept touching his lower lip, which was puffing up like a handful of boiled rice.

  Zagreb said, “Only the specials. You’re riding with boxcars of bullets from the Chrysler plant.”

  “Jeez, hope you don’t hit a bump.” Canal patted back a yawn.

  A streamliner locomotive sat on the tracks,
looking sleek as a destroyer, with a passenger coach behind it and then a chain of freight cars stretching into an infinity of darkness where the station lights failed. As the four men approached flanking the man in their charge, two men in blue business suits, one tall and thin and sallow, the other shorter and broad and deeply tanned, came toward them across the platform, each holding a leather folder open showing star-shaped badges. They wore their hats at opposite angles, making a V for Victory.

  “Zagreb? I’m Deputy Marshal Rudnicki. This is Deputy Marshal Cash. We’re here for Karpalov.” The short broad one spoke in clipped government tones.

  “Are you? I thought you were here for the tulip festival.”

  Burke glanced around. “Where’re your horses?”

  “That gets funnier every time. Take the cuffs off, please.” Rudnicki produced a pair of his own.

  “Not till you sign this. I don’t want him coming back stamped ‘Return to Sender.’” Zagreb held out the document.

  Rudnicki hesitated, peering at Karpalov. “He looks a little used.”

  “Accident. People drive like maniacs since the war. Too many women behind the wheel.”

  “My sister flies cargo planes for the navy.” Cash, the thin one, had a honking New York accent.

  “We need more of her on the ground.”

  Rudnicki juggled the handcuffs and the paper in one hand and took out a fat fountain pen. A gust of wind rattled the sheet just as he got the cap off. Zagreb said, “Use Cash. He looks sturdy.”

  Cash turned and bent with his hands on his knees while his partner spread the document on his back. He started to write.

  “Hold on!”

  This was a new voice, belonging to a fat man with 1930s lapels waddling his way from the direction of the station. He was clutching a battered hat to his head with one hand and waving an envelope with the other. When six handguns pointed his way, he braked to a halt, nearly falling on his face from his own momentum.

  “Don’t shoot! I’m Winston Sweet, with the legal firm of Roylston, Ryker, and Reed. I have a court order enjoining you from remanding Edward Illyich Karpalov into U.S. custody pending investigation of his immigration status.”