Jitterbug

by Loren D. Estleman

  After a few more minutes Zagreb looked at his Wittnauer and said it was time to see how the other half was coming along. They went back and gave the knock.

  McReary opened. He had freckles on his young bald head and an expressive mouth that sent all the wrong signals—like last week, when he’d smiled while reporting the death of Edsel Ford, a man he admired, as if it were Mussolini who’d died. Ford had once tipped him a hundred dollars for helping to arrange security at a party in Grosse Pointe.

  “Anything?” the lieutenant asked.

  The bald officer grinned and nodded. “Not a damn thing. We thought we’d wait for you before we got impolite.”

  “Who’s Jekyll?”

  “That’d be me.”

  Zagreb and Canal went in. It was a narrow room with faded sunflowers on the paper above scarred wainscoting and a window looking out on the yellow brick wall of the secondhand clothing store next door. The squad had picked it for the view. There was a painted iron bedstead with the mattress rolled up against the headboard, exposing the springs, a table by the door where Burke and McReary had laid their service pieces, and two upright wooden chairs, both occupied. Burke, several years older than Sergeant Canal but still just an officer, sat astraddle with his beefy furred forearms folded across the back of his chair, facing a Negro in his fifties, sitting with his wrists cuffed behind him. The Negro was naked. His ribs showed and his chest was hollow, but he had a huge penis even when flaccid—one of the rare examples Zagreb had seen of that racial tall tale in practice. The wooden seat of the chair between the man’s spread thighs was soaked, not entirely with sweat. The rank ammonia stench had been detectable from the hall.

  The newcomers squeaked their revolvers from their underarm holsters and placed them on the table before approaching the seated pair. The precaution was the lieutenant’s, inspired by the death of an officer in Ecorse in 1931 when a small-time bootlegger got hold of his piece during interrogation and shot him in the head.

  “What’s the holdup?” Zagreb asked Burke.

  The officer in the chair didn’t stir or take his eyes off the Negro. “Ask Mac. I wanted to toss the shine out the window but he said no.”

  “There’s a war on. Rationing, you know? Before you go anywhere you have to ask yourself: Is this trip necessary?” McReary looked mournful over his little joke.

  Canal swiveled his eyes, registering his opinion of McReary as Jekyll to Burke’s Hyde. Burke was large and soft and moonfaced and smiled when he was amused and scowled when he was upset. He cried when Kate Smith sang “God Bless America.” Burke inspired trust.

  The naked man sat with his chin on his chest, staring at the floor. He’d vomited in his own lap; bits of green vegetable and what looked like bean sprouts had dried in his pubic hair. Chinese? Zagreb stood over him with his hands in his pockets.

  “You’re a lucky man, Richard, bet you didn’t know that. You sold Sergeant Canal a brand-new set of Uniroyals, complete with spare. You’re not a licensed tire dealer, you’re not registered with the OPA. You didn’t ask for stamps. We could’ve turned you over to the feds. They hang black marketeers. Michigan hasn’t hanged anybody since eighteen thirty.”

  “I’m a lucky man,” mumbled the Negro into his chest.

  “Lucky as Andy Hardy. It just so happens the sergeant’s got a mad on for J. Edgar Hoover. Isn’t that right, Sergeant?”

  “Fuck J. Edgar,” said Canal.

  “The sergeant wanted to be a G-man. It’s all he ever wanted since he read in Liberty about how the feds got Dillinger. His application with his picture got all the way up to Hoover’s office. Hoover tossed it in the ashcan. What was it he said, Sergeant?”

  “He said I looked like Eddie Cantor.”

  “That’s what I meant when I said you were lucky, Richard. Turns out the sergeant’s a Jolson man. Sing ‘Swanee,’ Sergeant.”

  “I left my pitch pipe in the apartment.”

  “Too bad. You ought to hear him. Close your eyes, you swear it’s the radio. Now, McReary’s all for Cantor. He’d just as soon the feds put your neck in a rope. Burke’s tone-deaf, but he doesn’t like paperwork. That’s two for, one against.”

  Now Richard lifted his head. One eye was swollen shut. His nose had bled and the blood had dried into a black crust on his lip, but he still didn’t look much like Hitler. “How about you?”

  “I like Crosby.”

  The naked man seemed to find that amusing. He snorted. His nose started bleeding again.

  “Der Bingle for me,” Zagreb said. “So you can see I’m undecided. I know what I don’t want, though. I don’t want to see the feds hang you out at Fort Wayne and spoil our perfect record. Well, perfect since eighteen thirty. Where’d you get the tires?”

  “Found ’em on Outer Drive. Somebody dumped ’em.”

  “Why would anyone dump a brand-new set of tires when the governor’s driving on recaps?”

  “Maybe he didn’t have no stamps neither.”

  “Was it the Conductor?”

  “I don’t know no conductors. My daddy was a porter on the B-and-O.”

  Burke leaned back, hooked an ankle under the rung of Richard’s chair, and lifted the front legs off the floor. The Negro’s bare feet dangled.

  “You’re not a stupid nigger, Richard,” Zagreb said. “You ran numbers for Big Nabob until he got capped. You still run whores for Frankie Orr. Doesn’t he let you call him the Conductor? You know why they call him that?”

  Richard shook his head. Zagreb nodded at Burke, who straightened his leg with a snap. Richards chair went back and down with a bang. The glass shivered in the window frame. Somebody in the room below thumped at his ceiling with a broom handle.

  The lieutenant stepped forward and stood astraddle the Negro where he had rolled off the chair onto the floor. Zagreb’s hands were out of his pockets and clenched at his sides. Instinctively Richard coiled himself into a fetal ball. The skin of his buttocks was loose and wrinkled.

  “They call Frankie Orr the Conductor because he garroted another guinea to death in front of a carload of passengers on the Seventh Avenue El, just before Sal Borneo brought him out here from New York. But you knew that, Richard. Big Nabob knew it when Frankie shot him and took over his racket and you with it. Now he’s taken over the black market, and that’s where you got the tires you sold Sergeant Canal.”

  “I don’t know no Frankies.”

  Zagreb snatched up the fallen chair by one leg and swung it up over his head. The back struck the bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. The bulb exploded with a hollow plop. Richard coiled himself tighter, burying his head between his knees. The lieutenant hovered, then swung the chair back down and let it drop. It glanced off the naked man’s bent back. Richard took in his breath but made no other noise.

  The thumping started up again from below.

  Zagreb was exhausted suddenly. “Where do you live, Richard?”

  “Sojourner Truth.”

  “Jesus.” McReary grinned.

  “Give him his clothes and take him home,” Zagreb said.

  Canal goggled. “Money changed hands!”

  Burke said, “What about Frankie?”

  “You heard him. They never met.”

  “He’s a lying nigger.”

  “Any nigger who’d lie for two hours in room 309 of the California would lie his way onto the slab. I’ve been with the department since I got out of knickers. I haven’t killed anybody yet. I’m not going to do it over a fucking set of tires.”

  Canal said, “We’ll put him in a cab. He ain’t stinking up the Olds.”

  “Put him in a Zero if you want. Just get him the hell out.” The lieutenant fished in a pocket and came out with two zinc pennies and a streetcar token. “Who’s got a nickel?”

  McReary had one. Canal followed Zagreb to the pay telephone at the end of the hall. The lieutenant called downtown, said “yeah” three times, wrote an address on a bare patch of wall, and hung up. “Hamtramck cops need a hand with a h
omicide on Dequindre.”

  “That’s Brandon’s detail.”

  “Killer walked off with the deceased’s ration stamps. Could be black market.”

  “Four-F shirking bastards.”

  “Half of Hamtramck’s stationed in England. We’re all in this together, right?” He tapped a Chesterfield out of his pack.

  “So they say.” Canal watched him light up. “That was some Hyde in there.”

  Zagreb snapped shut the Zippo. “I used to be Jekyll.”

  chapter three

  THE DEPARTMENT HAD ISSUED them a 1941 Oldsmobile sedan, black, with a two-way radio and blackout headlights. Burke, the snazziest dresser inside a detective’s budget, with a charge account at Hudson’s and eight payments to go on his walnut console Philco radio-phonograph, thought the car looked like a carpet beetle. He’d refused to ride in it at first, but cabs were getting scarce and he’d relented finally, although not without making an acid comment every time he put a foot on the running board. When the squad was created in 1939 they had been promised a new unit every year. Then Pearl Harbor came along, GM, Dodge, Ford, Chrysler, DeSoto, and the others switched to tanks and bombers, and Baldy McReary added regular tours of all the junkyards in southeastern Michigan and Greater Toledo to his job description. So far he had managed to scrounge a transmission, steering column, AM radio, and the entire rear end of a 1940 model, all of which he stashed in a barn in Oakland County, dividing the storage fee with the others, against the inevitable breakdown. The farmer who owned the barn had threatened once to donate the contents to the government scrap drive if they failed to pay up the first of every month, but after a visit from Canal he had reconsidered and granted them a two-week grace period.

  The cop on the scene in Hamtramck was a skinny albino named Walters. He wore a seersucker suit that hung on him like a sail and a half-inch coat of Noxzema on his white face to protect him from the June sun. Pinkwater eyes swam behind eyeglass lenses as thick as ashtrays. His obvious Adam’s apple went up and down like a piston when he read Zagreb’s ID.

  “The Four Horsemen! I was beginning to think you guys were invented by George Stark.”

  Stark was a columnist with the Detroit News.

  “Not hardly.”

  “I hear you keep those Four-F assholes in line down at the beergardens. Bust their heads and throw ’em out in the alley with the swizzle sticks.”

  Canal said, “Jesus H. Christ,” and turned his back to enjoy the view of the identical house across the street.

  “We’re not supposed to bust them,” Zagreb said. “Just lump them up so they remember us every time they put on a hat.”

  “Long as I don’t have to take part. They pulled me off Records for this detail. The regular guy’s in the Pacific. I’m a librarian.”

  “No kidding. You want to check out the stacks for a stiff? They told us you had one here.”

  Walters pulled the chain on his vacant smile and stepped aside from the doorway. Zagreb and Canal entered, followed by Burke and McReary, who with a hat covering his bald head looked like a kid from the reserve.

  The living room was gray, not much wider than a hallway, and lit only by a single lamp and stuttering flashes from the Speed Graphic in the hands of a Detroit police photographer. Zagreb knew him slightly, a pudgy youngster with a cold cigar stub screwed permanently into the middle of his face and always the same baggy suit belted just under his sternum. He started basic training at the end of the month. Henry Brandon, inspector with Detroit Homicide, moved with him, shuttling backward and from side to side in a crouch like a fight referee, pointing out new angles. He ran toward lightweight gray double-breasteds, a white Panama hat between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and gold-rimmed spectacles. His temples were prematurely white.

  The rest of the room belonged to a middle-aged woman with a face straight out of a newsreel from the Warsaw Ghetto, round, puffy, and dough-colored. Someone had cut her open like a deer and stretched her out on her back on the rug, a fern-leaf pattern with fringes. The eighteen-inch slash had begun to draw flies.

  Brandon spotted Zagreb and stepped over the body to join him.

  “Thought you’d be called up by now,” he said by way of greeting. “All of Stationary Traffic shipped out last week. Uniform’s up to its ass in ugly meter maids.”

  “Essential duty,” Zagreb said. Brandon was too close to Commissioner Witherspoon for him to like. “I hear there are stamps missing.”

  “The husband says whoever did it took every ration book in he house. He won’t say how many. Hoarders. Nothing else was stolen, he says. They had forty-six bucks in cash in a cigar box in the bedroom dresser, right where they kept the stamps. They still have. So whoever did it’s looking for a black market sale. Thought you might want a look.”

  “Where’s the husband?”

  “In the bedroom, bawling his head off. Polack, works at Dodge Main. I don’t think he did it. It’s a deep wound. There’s a carving knife in the kitchen, but it’s clean.”

  “Forced entry?”

  Brandon shook his head. “Way it looks, he grabbed her from behind and cut her backhanded. She trusted him enough to turn her back on him.”

  “But it wasn’t the husband.”

  “He’s got fists like sides of beef. He wouldn’t have to cut her. Anyway, she’s been dead a couple of hours. He called us as soon as he got home from work. You can go back and talk to him if you like.”

  “Take a look first. Okay?”

  “Be my guest.”

  He didn’t bother looking at the wound. There were no slashes on her palms, just a purple stain at the base of the third and fourth fingers on the right one. He sniffed at it. “Ink,” he said. “Find a pen?”

  “No. But we haven’t moved the body yet. Coroner’s late.” Brandon fitted a Lucky into a black onyx holder and lit it off a gold-and-enamel lighter. He didn’t look the least bit like Roosevelt.

  Zagreb finished with the body. His gaze alighted on a pedestal table. He lifted the fringed shade off the lamp that stood on it and tilted the lamp. The glare of the bulb showed a pattern of indentations on the table’s varnished top. “She used this to write on. Can you get it?” He looked at the photographer.

  The photographer squinted. He had the best eye downtown. The army would probably make him a cook. “Sure.” He snapped off a dozen shots from every angle, catching the spent bulbs and replacing them on the fly. Zagreb turned the lamp this way and that on the young man’s command. When he stopped to crank in a fresh roll of film, the lieutenant set the lamp on the floor and fished out one of the folded sheets of newsprint he used to take notes.

  “Anybody got a pencil? No, a pencil.”

  Brandon, who had produced a fountain pen, returned it to his double-breasted, patted his pockets, and shook his head. He looked at Walters. The Hamtramck cop took inventory and came up with a gnawed yellow stump, sharpened with a penknife. Zagreb took it. He smoothed out the sheet on the table and scrubbed the side of the lead back and forth across the page.

  “Look at Charlie Chan,” said Brandon.

  Zagreb held it up and squinted, then handed it to McReary, who had the best eyesight on the squad. The bald officer squatted on his haunches to look at it in the light of the lamp on the floor.

  “Looks like she signed something,” he said. “A signature, anyway. Did some printing too. Numbers. What’s the address here?”

  “Twenty-six ten Dequindre,” said Walters.

  “Yeah. There’s an H and an A and maybe M.”

  “Hamtramck.”

  Everyone turned to stare at Burke, who looked away and didn’t contribute anything more.

  “And O-S-T,” McReary said.

  “OST?” Zagreb looked at Walters, who touched the Noxzema on his cheek.

  “Well, there’s Botsford Street. But that’s a mile north.”

  “That’s OTS. See anything else?”

  “Not that I can read.” McReary stood.

  “How soon can we have those s
hots?” Zagreb asked the photographer.

  “Tomorrow night. I’m still processing the stuff from the Brzezicki shooting.”

  “Tomorrow morning’s fine.”

  Brandon said, “Hold on. We’ve been working the Brzezicki twenty-four hours.”

  “Wartime priority,” Zagreb said. “You made the call. You can have this one if you want.”

  The inspector said nothing.

  Zagreb said, “Let’s get a look at the husband.”

  The bedroom was a coffin, two-thirds the size of the living room and dominated by an antique bed with a six-foot walnut headboard. Joseph Levinski was sitting on the edge of the mattress with his big feet on the floor in their steel-toed brogans and his big shaggy head sunk between his shoulders as if to deflect blows. His face was red and gullied where tears had furrowed through the grime. He was still holding his black lunch pail on his lap. Zagreb guessed: liverwurst, an apple, maybe a Baby Ruth for after, milk in the Thermos. In November it would be chicken noodle soup. A pair of officers in the uniform of the Hamtramck Police Department, Polacks both from the look of them—ox-eyed, slate-jawed, arms bent at the elbows even in repose, the tendons shortened by generations of heavy lifting—took up the space not occupied by the bed and a new-looking chest of drawers in contrasting colors of wood. They looked relieved by the fresh company.