Jitterbug (28 page)

All this was on the sheet, but Zagreb was pleased to see most of the officers recording the information in pocket notebooks. Mimeos got lost all the time, while piles of shabby spiral pads, scribbled all over with doodles on the covers, were always turning up among their personal effects when they died or were killed in the line of duty. They never threw them away. He was one brass hat who placed a knowledge of shorthand ahead of marksmanship in his evaluation of the rank and file.

“From age eleven to fourteen, Ziska was raised in a succession of foster homes, in only one of which his residency exceeded six months. In 1932 he was convicted of arson after his sixth and final foster home burned to the ground, injuring both his legal guardians, Rudolf and Esther Muenster. Mrs. Muenster died of complications following a sixteenth skin graft one year and one day after the fire; twenty-four hours earlier and a charge of murder would have been brought against Ziska. Upon his release from the Monroe County juvenile facility in 1936, he petitioned for the return of a U.S. Army bayonet, serial number nine three seven six one four Edward, dated 1916, which he claimed had belonged to his father. His petition was granted. We believe this is the weapon used by Ziska in five murders.” He turned the page.

“Ladislaus Ziska is twenty-five years old, brown hair and eyes, five-ten-and-a-half, a hundred and sixty, no scars or other distinguishing marks. One female eyewitness in Hudson’s has remarked upon his resemblance to the actor Robert Taylor.”

This brought the first laugh of the morning. “No photos are available, since the juvenile authorities don’t take mug shots. We have a police sketch of the suspect based on the eyewitness’s description, copies of which Sergeant Obolensky will hand out at the end of this briefing.” He held it up.

“Psychiatric report filed at the time of Ziska’s rejection for military service reads as follows: ‘paranoid schizophrenia with persecutory patterns and delusions of grandeur.’ In layman’s terms, a nut.” More laughter. “Not a joke, gentlemen. It means he doesn’t scare. Up until Hudson’s his victims were all elderly and frail, not the type to put up much of a fight. They now include an armed professional security guard in his forties and healthy. The very fact that he would extend his activities to a busy downtown department store in broad daylight indicates he has no fear of being captured or killed. Ziska likes to dress up as a soldier. Soldiers are trained to be prepared to die for their oath. Just like police officers.”

He was no longer reading from his prepared statement. He paused to let the last comment sink in, then pronounced the three words that no lieutenant of the Detroit Police Department had used since the demise of the Purple Gang:

“Shoot to kill.”

The press conference was set up in the ornate mosaic lobby of the City Hall, and briefly attended by Commissioner Witherspoon, who stayed long enough to have his picture taken with the officials involved, then breezed on out before the first question was hurled. Inspector Brandon, still glistening from a visit to his barber, put on glasses to read off many of the same remarks Zagreb had delivered at 1300, then introduced the lieutenant with a little push from behind. Only the temporary podium kept Zagreb from falling among the agitated reporters. His first impression was of a herd of drop-front Speed-Graphic cameras wearing hats.

“Lieutenant, any chance this guy’s really a serviceman?”

“No, we checked with all the branches. There’s no record he applied with any of them after the army rejected him.”

“Think he’s working for the enemy?”

“We’re operating on the assumption he’s a loner.”

“Where’s he selling the stamps?”

“Ration stamps are traceable. So far no stamps issued to any of Ziska’s stamps victims have shown up in circulation.”

“Isn’t Ziska a Kraut name? Sure he isn’t fifth column?”

“It’s Czechoslovakian.”

“What’s his motive?”

“It’s just a theory. We think he’s a superpatriot, or considers himself to be one. He thinks he’s helping the war effort by targeting hoarders.”

“Any chance he’s right?”

“No, those are tactics more worthy of the enemy. Ziska’s no, hero.”

“How many cops you got on this case?”

“Commissioner Witherspoon has committed the entire department to bring Ladislaus Ziska to justice.”

“How will that affect what’s going on in Paradise Valley?”

Zagreb shielded his eyes. The jinking flashbulbs had blue bubbles swirling between him and the reporters. “Who said that?”

“Ray Girardin,
Times.
”

The voice belonged to a man standing on the edge of the crowd. His suit was less rumpled than the general lot although no more expensive. He had a tired face, all loose skin, as if the skull beneath had begun to recoil from the things its owner had witnessed. Only his eyes remained prominent: large, luminous, not quite as protuberant as Sergeant Canal’s, but hardly less unnerving.

“Hello, Ray. Where’ve you been keeping yourself?”

“Here in City Hall. Mr. Hearst thinks I’m too dignified to go on chasing kidnappers and bank robbers the way I did in the old days.”

“What’s this about Paradise Valley?”

“Well, not just the Valley. We’ve got unconfirmed reports of clashes between whites and Negroes throughout the city since early yesterday evening. Shouldn’t the department be keeping some officers in reserve in case of a full-scale disturbance?”

“Clashes are nothing new. We’ve got a lot of people up from the Jim Crow South working side by side with colored employees in the plants. We’ve been handling the brawls pretty well so far.”

“Two weeks ago the KKK launched a full-scale strike at the Packard plant because three Negroes were promoted. The army had to be brought in to investigate. It doesn’t sound like the police handled that one at all.”

“The police aren’t going anywhere, Ray. We’ll be right here in town if the Civil War breaks out all over again. Meanwhile we’ve got a psycho killer to put behind bars.”

“Version I heard was you gave orders to shoot to kill.”

“You said that, I. didn’t.”

Zagreb took a question from Rolf Owen of the
News.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Girardin flip shut his pocket notebook and walk away.

The police sketch of Kilroy, with captions identifying him as Ladislaus Ziska, ran on the front pages of special editions of the city’s three major dailies and those tabloids that had survived the Depression and the wartime paper shortage. Within an hour the switchboard at 1300 was jammed with calls reporting Ziska had been sighted, as close as Greektown and as far away as Ann Arbor. Officers were dispatched to interview those callers who had not immediately been tabbed as crackpots. Zagreb and the Racket Squad heard about every call and stayed put in the squad room.

“I still say we should of went back and hung Frankie out his office window by his ankles.” Canal tossed a quarter into the Town Club crate next to the coffee urn, a smaller cousin of the giant in the basement, made change from the nickels and dimes already there, and poured himself a fresh cup; fresh being a benevolent description of the stuff that issued from the spout. The container hadn’t been dumped out and recharged since early that morning.

“It wouldn’t help,” Zagreb said. “Vice and Burglary both picked up characters with the Kilroy sketch stuffed in their pockets. He got them out on the streets okay.”

“I meant just for fun.”

McReary’s telephone jangled. He rewrapped his tongue sandwich from the Grecian Gardens in wax paper, dumped it in his wastebasket, took his feet off his typewriter leaf, and answered it.

Burke said, “What brand is Girardin drinking these days? Think he believes that riot crap?”

“
Times
is holding on by its teeth. An old-fashioned berserk murderer isn’t enough to boost circulation anymore.” The lieutenant fired up a Chesterfield. He’d found his Zippo in the lining of his raincoat.

“He was on police beat too long. He wants to be commissioner.”

Canal gulped scalding coffee. Zagreb, who had been waiting ten minutes for his to cool, decided the sergeant’s mouth and throat were lined with asbestos. “I expected to feel swell when we had a name for Kilroy. I’m thinking we lost him for good the minute we found it out.”

“That’s what I like about you, Starvo Always see the dark cloud around the silver lining.”

Canal made a farting noise in Burke’s direction.

McReary cupped a hand over his mouthpiece. “Zag, you might want to take this.”

“Who is it?”

“Ziska’s landlady.”

C
OMFORTABLE?”
E
LIZABETH ASKED.

“I’m fine,” Dwight said.

He was sore all over, and his cramped position on the passenger’s side of the Model A didn’t help. His body was laced with painkillers, but his swollen face burned and the lump of bandage on the side of his head where they’d shaved it to stitch up a scalp laceration caused by the steel toe of a work boot made him feel lopsided. The tape around his abdomen was so tight he couldn’t fill his lungs, which he guessed was the idea; the two fractured ribs were pinching him enough as it was. His arms and legs were a rainbow of bruises. When he thought about it, the insides of his knees and elbows were the only parts of him that didn’t hurt. Babies in the womb had the right idea. It was only when you came out of the curl that you got in trouble.

Earl climbed in on the other side of Elizabeth and punched the starter. “You’re staying with us a couple. You ain’t in no shape to do for yourself.”

Dwight said nothing. Who was arguing? As they pulled away from the curb he watched with detachment the nurse rolling the empty wheelchair back through the doors of Detroit General Hospital. Receiving, most folks called it, on account of it was all the time receiving patients in a shot and battered condition. Place boasted more doctors and nurses with wound trauma experience than any other hospital outside the theaters of war.

“Who pulled me out?” Dwight asked then.

“You mean out of the toilet? Who you think? Who’s in charge of making sure you don’t get your head beat off?”

He looked at Earl, seeing for the first time that his brother’s right eye was swollen almost shut. It bunched up like balloons when he grinned back.

Elizabeth said, “Well, the bouncer pretty much had the job finished when you got there. Otherwise I’d be driving you both home. If I knew how to drive.”

“Thanks, Earl.”

“Shit, little brother. It’s my job.” He turned out of the driveway onto Grand. “Only I wisht you talked the cops out of hanging on to that Hupmobile stick.”

Night had fallen, a particularly dark one with almost all the illumination in the city provided by streetlamps and automobile headlights; blackout curtains were a requirement everywhere, and although air-raid drills were less frequent than they had been at the panicky start of the war, the heavy material was still in place in most windows. He’d never seen so many in use at one time. Without visible lights the downtown skyscrapers made black oblongs against a slightly lighter sky. The houses looked evacuated. He hadn’t noticed that before, and wondered if the morphine in his bloodstream had distorted his outlook. It made him feel uneasy, as if he had entered a city preparing for siege.

Earl and Elizabeth’s block was even more desolate. Theirs was the only car on the street, and the rickety sound of the motor echoed off the blank fronts of the houses on both sides.

“Sure is quiet,” Elizabeth said.

“Good.” Earl turned into their driveway. “Some kind of fight happening on Belle Isle. They was talking about it in the lobby when I was waiting for you and Dwight. They said a bunch of whites attacked a colored woman on the bridge, throwed her baby into the river.”

“My God, Earl!”

“It’s just crazy talk.”

Elizabeth made up the studio couch. Dwight had insisted on it and won his point, because it was big enough to sleep only one comfortably, and anyway he wasn’t about to put them out of their bedroom. His jaw was too sore to chew. It was too hot for soup, so she mixed a pitcher of eggnog and he drank two glasses through a straw, the hospital broth he’d had for lunch having had no staying power. The pills he took after supper made him drowsy. Earl lent him his pajamas and helped him into them and Elizabeth tucked him in. He went to sleep saying something about what a good mother she’d make. He didn’t know where he got that, maybe from Mammy Yokum. His and Earl’s mother had never been known to do anything of the sort.

He had a wet dream. It must have been the morphine or the pills, he didn’t get them as a rule, and when he awoke hearing unfamiliar voices, he was mortified and looked down at himself quickly to see if the stain showed. But the blanket covered him. It took him another minute to place one of the voices as it came to the forefront. It was Gabriel Heatter’s. Someone was listening to the network news.

“ … including actor Leslie Howard, were aboard the plane when it was reported missing and are believed dead. On the home front, Edward J. Jeffries, Jr., Mayor of Detroit, has deployed two hundred police to quell widespread rioting between Negroes and whites in his city, and may request Michigan Governor Harry Kelly to dispatch units of the state police and national guard. To forestall further violence, all the saloons in the city have been ordered closed and owners of pawnshops and hardware stores instructed to remove all firearms, ammunition, and knives from their shelves and display windows and lock them up in the wake of rumors of atrocities committed by whites against Negroes and vice versa on Belle Isle, a popular recreation spot in the Detroit River. Colored clergymen and civic leaders have denounced the rumors as erroneous. We have reports of motorists, colored and white, pulled from their cars and beaten.

“In Washington today, President Roosevelt met with …”

There was a squeal of static, a trill of dance music, laughter from a studio audience, a piece of the Barbasol jingle. Dwight twisted his head, sending a bolt of pure pain from his neck to the top of his skull. Elizabeth, wrapped in her yellow robe, was standing in a crouch in front of the radio with her hand on the tuning knob. The glow from the dial drenched her taut face in a jack-o’-lantern shade of orange.