Jitterbug (14 page)

Zagreb flicked ashes into the mounded-over tray. “He’s a colored man caught in a felony. You think Hearst is going to waste an inch on him if we string him up or send him to the Milan federal house for twenty years?”

The room got quiet. The chattering of the typewriter outside, and the drone of a male voice on the telephone, came in over the partition. Dwight crossed his legs, the first time he had ever done so in a white man’s presence. “What’s the deal?” he asked.

“Ever hear of Frankie Orr?”

“The gangster?”

“A little history lesson, Dwight; no extra charge.” This time he didn’t apologize for condescending to call him by his Christian name. “Orr’s Sicilian born, but he didn’t stay there long enough to pick up the language. Grew up in New York City, ran numbers, tended bar, bounced drunks with a sawed-off baseball bat for the Five Points mob. That was Capone’s old outfit. How old are you, Dwight?”

“Nineteen.”

“I’d’ve thought older. This was during the dry time, I don’t guess you’d remember it much. Anyway, Frankie got himself into some heat when he used a piece of piano wire to strangle another guinea to death on the New York Elevated, which is why they still call him the Conductor. Old Sal Borneo—he headed up the Mafia here in Detroit—took him on as a favor for his greaseball friends back East. Lucky us. We’ve got him down for the Jerry Buckley killing in ’30, no evidence, the Collingwood Massacre in ’31, no evidence, and the murder of Joey Machine in ’35. No evidence. Am I going too fast?’

Dwight shook his head.

“Good. I get excited when I start talking about Frankie. He’s my favorite subject after gonorrhea. Let’s see, the murder of Joey Machine. Which after Old Sal died peacefully in his sleep put Frankie in charge of what the papers like to refer to as all illicit activities in the Motor City. We know he spearheaded the drive to take over the slot machine action in the Midwest after Repeal, and everyone who runs a legitimate bar between here and Indianapolis knows you don’t install a juke-box without Frankie’s friendly seal on the back unless you want your place firebombed and your female customers raped in the parking lot.

“Well, now it happens we’ve got us a little war. FDR’s signature wasn’t dry on the Rationing Act when Frankie bought a warehouse in Toledo and started stocking it with butter and eggs and meat and gasoline, barrels and barrels of gasoline; strike a match within two blocks of the place and you could invite everyone in the forty-eight to the barbecue. There isn’t a farmer or an oilman in the country won’t tell you he can get a better price from Frankie Orr than he can from the War Department, and you don’t have to wait for the check to clear on account of he deals in cash.”

“The American Way,” Dwight said. He’d never known a cop to be so gassy.

“Hey, the country started with a hijacking. We didn’t pay for that tea. It’s not all greed, though. The government’s been trying to deport Frankie for years for violation of the Mann Act, you believe it? Transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes. Pimping charge. He needs the money for his defense fund. The price of congressmen has gone up like everything else since the New Deal. But he’s learned from his past mistakes. Every one of his black marketeers turns in enough ration tickets and stamps to justify a healthy volume of customer traffic. Sure, there’s counterfeiting—anyone with a cylinder press and a decent engraver can dupe them off, and you’d be surprised how much goodwill you can buy from investigators with a refrigerator full of meat and a set of tires—but he does a lively trade fencing stolen stamps. That’s where your brother comes in, and where Kilroy comes in.”

“What makes you think Earl’s doing business with Orr?”

“He’s got to. If he went to anyone else, and that party didn’t go to Orr, we’d have found both of them strung up by now in the Buhl Building with blowtorch tans. That American Frankie isn’t. Competition gives him hives.”

“Maybe Earl’s saving ’em to use for himself.”

“If he did, he could throw a block party every day for a month. He hasn’t been in town long enough to make that many friends.”

Dwight had run out of arguments, not that it mattered. He’d guessed the worst the moment the lieutenant had told him about the ration stamps. “What do you want from me?”

“Not a damn thing.”

Dwight waited. Zagreb finished his cigarette in silence. He put it out, dislodging a couple of butts from the pile, which he ignored. He took a swollen nine-by-twelve manila folder from the belly drawer, unwound the string that held the flap shut, and tipped its contents out onto Dwight’s side of the desk. There was some change, a cheap gold-plated tie clip with an Old English
E
on a blue enamel background, a worn leather wallet, and a key attached to a Bakelite tag bearing what was left of the name of a used-car dealer in Montgomery, half-worn away from handling. Dwight recognized the tag, and the key to his Model A.

The lieutenant dug through the mess on the desk until he found a pad of preprinted forms, which he filled out with a fountain pen and signed his name. He tore off the top sheet and thrust it at Dwight.

“Take that to Interrogation Three. It’s on the third floor. You might want to stop at a White Tower on the way home. We didn’t touch Earl, but we didn’t feed him either.”

“You’re letting him go?” Dwight reached for the sheet.

Zagreb pulled it back. “He was never booked. We could’ve got what we want out of him eventually, but I don’t have the stomach for it these days. Why break bones when you can talk civilized to his brother?”

“I don’t know nothing.”

“We know. But you will. We’re holding on to those stolen tickets, and if we don’t hear from you in march time with something we can use, we’re tying up the box and sticking a stamp on it and sending it to Washington.”

“But what do you want?”

“Names. A name. Earl’s black-market contact will do to start. We probably know it, but if we can link him to an actual transaction we’ll have leverage.”

“Who you after, Frankie Orr or Kilroy?”

“We’ll settle for both.” Zagreb moved a shoulder. “Call me a hoarder, I’m greedy. We talked to Frankie. He says he doesn’t know who Kilroy is any more than we do and I believe him, but if we can apply some pressure and get him to put his boys to work and smoke the son of a bitch out, I’ll be satisfied. Deal?” He waved the release form as if it were a bonus check.

“I’ll talk to him. I can’t promise nothing. Earl was born with a lie on his lips.”

“I’ll take that chance, Dwight. I can afford to. Earl’s the one stands to lose.”

Dwight took the form, scooped up the items from the envelope, and distributed them among his pockets. He pushed himself out of the chair, using the arms. He’d gained a hundred pounds since sitting down, and he hadn’t come in feeling light. When he didn’t turn right away to leave, Zagreb lifted his eyebrows.

“How you know I don’t know nothing?” Dwight asked.

“We got your address from Personnel after we kicked in Earl’s locker. We searched your room this morning. No stamps, no corpses under the bed. Speaking of which, the bed hadn’t been slept in. You take your sister-in-law home last night, Dwight?”

“Go to hell.”

All the playful animosity went out of the lieutenant’s face. He aimed his finger at Dwight like a gun. “Everybody gets one,” he said. “That was yours. Now get your black ass out of my office.”

F
OR A TIME AFTER
Dwight Littlejohn left his office, Max Zagreb sat doing nothing. His hands took out his cigarette pack, but he looked at the heap of coffee-stained butts in the bronze ashtray and his stomach did a slow-turn. He returned the pack to his shirt pocket, turned up the volume on the police-band, then after a minute or so realized he wasn’t taking in a word of what he was hearing, and turned it off.

He felt exhausted and vaguely ashamed of himself. He looked at the smooth, characterless face of Police Cadet Zagreb in the group photograph hanging crooked on the wall and couldn’t think of a way to explain to him that serving the citizens of Detroit meant bullying the Dwight Littlejohns who came to it. The Earl Littlejohns were halfway to hell already. But he wasn’t bothered so much by his parting words to Dwight as he was by the fact that he wasn’t bothered more. That was how Inspector Brandons happened.

“McReary!”

The typewriter stopped chartering. The door opened and the bald officer leaned in.

“Hear anything yet from that Lieutenant Walters in Hamtramck?”

“Not a thing. Want me to call him?”

“I’ll do it.” Zagreb lifted the receiver, found the number on the mustard-stained list he kept next to the telephone, and dialed. McReary was still standing in the doorway. “What.”

“You really kicking Littlejohn?”

“Small fish. Bait.”

“What’ll you tell those newspaper assholes when they ask if we’ve made any arrests?”

“Why don’t you let me worry about that?”

McReary shook his head. “I’ll never be a lieutenant. How do you know when you’re making a mistake?”

“Make plenty.”

The officer left. When Walters finally came on the line, Zagreb heard syrupy music in the background. It was too early for
One Man’s Family.
Maybe the scrawny albino had a weakness for Fred Waring.

“I never heard whether your boys turned anything on that house-to-house,” Zagreb said.

Violins simpered through a perplexed pause on the other end.

Jesus Christ. “Anna Levinski,” he prompted. “Someone cut her open in your jurisdiction?”

“Oh, right. I thought you’d have that tied up by now.” Paper crackled. “Levinski, Levinski. Okay.” A chair squeaked. “This ain’t as simple as it would’ve been a couple of years ago. Back then everyone was driving like a bat out of hell, foot traffic stood out. It’s a busy neighborhood, shortcut to just about everywhere, and everybody’s shank’s mare now. Also all the housewives are working in the plants.”

“You said that before.” He suspected Walters was bored and wanted someone to talk to.

“Talked to a Henrietta Wolocek.” Walters spelled it. “She’s at three-oh-one-two Dequindre, next block. Widow, sixty-two. Neighborhood snoop, spends more time in her front window than the silver star she got when her boy went down on the
Arizona.
Saw a bunch of people she didn’t know on the street the morning of the murder. We checked out the meter reader, he was a substitute, regular guy called in sick. Guy in a blue pinstriped suit knocked on the door of the house across the street and was let in. Talked to the homeowner there, want his name?”

“Later.”

“Pinstripes an adjuster with NBD, came there to inspect the property. Owner wants to refinance his mortgage. It checked out at the bank.”

“What else?”

“Nothing. The usual mix of strangers in a hurry, suits and coveralls and military uniforms. Needle in a haystack. Maybe you got the personnel to run them all down. I sure don’t. Send the report over?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Walters. Good work.”

“Always ready to help. Especially when it’s the Four—”

Zagreb hung up.

“McReary!”

McReary leaned in.

“Where’s the Yegerov file?”

The bald officer stared at the pile on Zagreb’s desk. “I think you’ve got it, Zag.”

“Shit.”

He spent the next, quarter hour looking for it. As long as he was at it he did a general housecleaning, glancing at and tossing obsolete memos into the wastebasket, finding room for the files he didn’t need immediately in the cabinet and the beer case on top of it, and shoveling the rest into the catchall drawer at the bottom of the desk. When he had a relatively clean work surface he spread open the file on the murdered dry cleaner. Except for the autopsy report, which matched those of Anna Levinski and Ernest Sullivan as to cause of death, there was nothing in the Yegerov case to link it to the others. He was not a hoarder, had a record of using the scanty number of stamps issued an aging widower with no dependents regularly. Few friends, none close, no known enemies.

Zagreb would have kicked the case back to Brandon except for the fact that if he laid any of the postmortem shots on top of any of those in the other two files and held them up to the light, all three ghastly incisions lined up. He was no great hand at homicide, but had sat in on enough investigations to recognize a brushstroke when he saw one.

He came to a photostat of the ledger page into which Yegerov recorded his business activities on the day he was killed. The old man had used Yiddish as a kind of shorthand, but Zagreb hadn’t lied to Dwight Littlejohn when he said he’d grown up in a mixed neighborhood; his smattering of Balkan tongues, Gaelic, street-nigger, and kike served him more often than any classical student’s knowledge of Greek and Latin. The cleaner had taken in several dresses, three suits, one blue and two brown, and a wedding gown. In a separate column he had recorded amounts paid for the items that had been reclaimed. The lieutenant turned from the photostat to the inventory of items found in the shop by police officers after his body was discovered. No wedding gown, but the gown had been brought in first thing that morning, cleaned, pressed, accepted, and paid for the same day. The dresses and one of the brown suits were still in inventory. The blue had needed pressing only and had been reclaimed and the transaction noted. Zagreb looked for the other brown suit in Yegerov’s ledger and found it, identified as “Anz, brn, ink,” with something illegible scribbled between the last two words. He slid his finger over to the transaction column. There was no entry.

Could be nothing. The cleaner was getting on, he had put in a long day, and when the garment was reclaimed he might have forgotten to record the event. But it was the only lapse on the sheet. A brown suit had been dropped off to have an ink stain or stains removed and the suit was not in the shop.

He was puzzled also by the nonsensical scribble following “Anz, brn.”
Anzug
meant suit of clothes. The thing after “brn”—brown—didn’t even look like letters. It might have been a doodle, except the neat characters and figures in the columns didn’t suggest a doodling kind of personality.