Jitterbug (7 page)

Carlo, the maître d’, had been in residence since shortly after Roma opened, working his way up from busboy to wine steward in a little over eighteen months—a performance that lost some of its shine upon consideration that he was a cousin of one of the proprietors. The final leap, from silver cup to reservation stand, had taken twelve years, and was accomplished only upon the death of the original maître d’, who had held that position in the second oldest restaurant in Florence from 1872 until he fled to escape execution for murdering his brother-in-law in a vendetta. Some customers, knowing only part of the story, mistook Carlo for the vendetta killer, but this was understandable. His predecessor, whose photograph in a silver frame decorated the wall beside the stand, had been a mild-looking white-haired fellow with ruddy cheeks and a cherub’s smile, whereas Carlo was lean and sallow with iron gray in his brushed-back hair and a five-inch scar on his right cheek where a tumor had been removed. He never smiled, the surgery having damaged the nerve that worked the required muscles, and his unblinking stare had silenced the bluster of many a would-be diner who claimed his reservation was lost. Very few people knew he sent most of his salary to his sister in Sardinia, that he attended confession three times a week, and that he hadn’t missed a Sunday Mass at Most Holy Trinity in thirty years.

Max Zagreb, who was one of those who knew, asked Carlo if he had a table for four. It was a polite question; the restaurant was nearly empty at that hour. The stragglers that remained were nursing last sips of coffee before going home to empty apartments and sullen families.

“The burners should still be hot.” Carlo snapped his fingers. A waiter in a knee-length apron separated himself from a group surreptitiously checking wristwatches and came their way.

“Frankie in?” Zagreb asked.

The maître d’ uncorked his lidless stare. “Signor Oro is dining in his private room. I’ll ask if he’s receiving visitors.”

“Make sure he says yes.”

Seated in a corner booth under a framed print of
The Last Supper,
the four detectives glanced at their red leather menus and folded them at the same instant, like a precision drill. “Veal parmigiana?” asked the lieutenant.

Canal said, “Double order for me. Two jugs of Dago Red.”

“One jug. We’re working.” Zagreb handed the menus to the waiter.

“I’ll just have the chowder,” said Burke. “My gut’s on end again.”

McReary said, “In that case I’ll have your veal, too. Getting the shit stomped out of me in a bar always brings out my appetite.”

Canal wiped each of his protruding eyes with a corner of his napkin. The condition was the result of an overactive thyroid and they tended to water at the end of the shift. “You’re just compensating for missing out on that leggy barmaid at the Ladybug.”

“‘Compensating’?” Burke was still a little pale from the morgue.

“His wife bought him a subscription to
Reader’s Digest.
” Zagreb peeled off his hat and smoothed his hair back from his bulbous forehead.

“Hey, I’d rather whack off to her than that picture of Betty Grable you got in your wallet,” McReary told Canal.

“It’s Alice Faye.”

The waiter left, and returned with a basket of bread and a pitcher of ice water. While he was pouring, a young couple came in the front door. The young man spoke briefly to Carlo, who shook his head. After some fumbling the young man produced a pair of crumpled bills. They vanished, and Carlo snapped his fingers. The girl was pretty, not much more. Her date was good-looking and knew it. He reminded Zagreb of a hundred good-looking young men he had seen hawking Pfeiffer and Luckies on billboards. The lieutenant wondered why he wasn’t in uniform. A waiter led the couple to a table behind a post and Zagreb forgot all about them.

“Signor Oro will see you now.”

Zagreb looked up from his bread slowly; an act of will in a situation that would have made most men jump. He hadn’t seen Carlo approaching, had not noticed that he had ever left the reservation stand to consult Frankie Orr. Life was mystifying. Burke and Canal and McReary clattered through it like junkwagons, making noise and drawing attention, and they became plainclothes detectives. Carlo the swarthy Sardinian could make himself invisible in a roomful of redheaded Irishmen, and he became a headwaiter.

“Tell him I’ll be there when I finish my meal.”

“He’s going home soon.”

“It’s a free country. If he doesn’t mind us dragging his guinea ass out of bed and down to the basement at Thirteen Hundred.”

Carlo’s unblinking stare was his only response. Then he was gone.

Canal grinned. “Just for a second there you sounded like Father Coughlin.”

“I got a thing against making appointments with cheap crooks.”

“So how long you going to let him boil?”

Zagreb smeared butter on his hunk of bread. “Just till I finish this.”

“Miss the uniform, I guess.”

McReary dunked his own bread in his glass of water. “Zag knows he’s safe. There ain’t enough dicks to go around till they hang Hitler.”

Burke said, “Going back to uniform don’t scare me. I don’t want Carlo spitting in my chowder.”

When the lieutenant ate the last of his bread, the others pushed back their chairs. “Just Canal,” he said. “I don’t want to give the little greaseball a coronary.”

“He’d have to have a heart to begin with,” Burke said. But he reached for his bread.

The room, normally reserved for large parties, contained Frankie Orr, seated in the middle of the long, empty table, and Tino, his bodyguard and sometime driver, pretending to be a piece of furniture in a corner. A tattered green, red, and white flag from some forgotten Italian campaign decorated a mahogany-paneled wall lined with portraits in frames of olive-skinned men in stiff collars with oiled hair and studs in their ties. Tino, a product of a Sicilian coastal village where sailors had docked for six hundred years, was fair-haired and blue-eyed, with roses in his cheeks and a beautiful mouth, curved like a violin. He had a twenty-inch neck and the muscles of his jaws stuck out on either side like barbells. Zagreb knew he carried an army .45 automatic in an underarm holster and that he used it to snuff out candles at outdoor wedding receptions on Belle Isle. His permit to carry a concealed weapon was signed by Governor Kelly; one of several services requested by his employer in return for helping to end a milk drivers’ strike in Port Huron. Two arrests, petty theft and assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder, no convictions. Zagreb liked Tino. He had bought his widowed father a house in Sterling Heights and had been among the first to present himself for recruitment at the Light Guard Armory after Pearl Harbor—catching hell from Frankie, who had pulled a senator out of bed to see that the paperwork was torn up. The bodyguard wore an American flag pin in his lapel and bought war bonds every payday.

Francis Xavier Oro, a Brooklyn tough imported by the late Sal Borneo to save Oro from street retribution following his acquittal on a charge of garroting a man to death aboard the New York elevated railway—hence the sobriquet the Conductor—had put on weight since Prohibition, but retained the slick good looks of a movie gangster. Streaks of silver highlighted the glossy black waves of his hair, and his teeth—straightened, bleached, and bonded—shone blue-white against his sunlamp tan when he chose to smile, which he seldom did when the police were present. His brows were plucked, his face close-shaven by a barber, and the nails on the fingers he was wiping with a moist warm towel provided by the waiter were pared and buffed, although never polished. The fit alone of his dark suit bespoke its two-hundred-dollar price tag, and a conservative striped necktie lay quietly against his white shirt. He had abandoned flash after the lesson of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, who had gone to prison more for the showiness of their lifestyle than the charges the government had trumped up against them. Rumor had it Frankie had been more than peripherally involved in the killing of radio commentator Jerry Buckley in 1931. Uncorroborated testimony by one witness before a grand jury had accused him of slashing the throat of a disloyal employee in a downtown restaurant the same year.

Orr put down the towel, picked up a knife, and pried open a mussel on a plate mounded high with them. A boneyard of empty shells lay on a platter at his elbow. “Max Zagreb,” he said without looking up. “What the hell kind of a name’s that?”

“Yugoslavian. What kind of name’s Orr?”

“Oro. If I wanted to go by what the newspapers call me I’d of put it on my citizenship papers.”

“The State Department wants to yank your citizenship, I heard.”

“The State Department’s got its hands full rounding up Japs to send to Manzanar.”

“They’ll run out of Japs.” Zagreb put his hands in his pockets. “I hear Mussolini hangs mafiosos six at a time. Right on the dock when they’re deported from America.”

“Mussolini’s got his hands full, too. You a citizen, Lieutenant?”

“I was born here.”

“I would of been if I’d had a say. It’s a great country. You know I came here with forty-eight dollars in my pocket? Now I own two hotels and I’m negotiating for a quarter interest in the Hazel Park track. The streets really are paved with gold.”

Canal said, “You just have to scrape off the shit to get down to it.”

Orr looked up at the big sergeant. The Sicilian had heavy lids with blue veins in them. He spoke to Zagreb. “The invitation was for one. Barney Google’s crashing the gate.”

“This isn’t a friendly call.” Zagreb was looking at Tino, who had come out of his slouch. The bodyguard met his gaze but stayed where he was.

“I guessed that. That’s why I didn’t offer you a mussel.” The racketeer sucked the meat out of the shell he’d opened, washed it down with red wine from his glass, discarded the shell, and reached for another. “If this is about the strike at the Packard plant, I’m not in that line of work now. It’s unpatriotic in time of war.”

“We’ll let Roosevelt handle that one,” Zagreb said. “This is about ration stamps.”

“If you’re short on red points I can make a call.”

“Somebody’s been killing old people for their stamps. Grabs them from behind and cuts them open and leaves them to bleed to death while he goes through their hoard.”

“That’s anti-American.”

Canal swiveled his eyes. “That’s one I didn’t expect from the Conductor.”

“I meant hoarding. Depletes the stores when they cash them in. Everybody suffers, especially our boys overseas. You ought to make this guy Citizen of the Year.”

Zagreb said, “We don’t have one of those. I guess we’ll lock him up till he rots instead.”

“I was kidding, of course. I don’t like amateur crooks. They fuck up the average.”

“You could help take this one off the street. We’re burning a lot of gasoline on him that should be going to submarines.”

“I’m all ears.” He held up an open shell as if he were listening through it.

“He’s got to be laying off those stamps someplace. You own the black market. You’d know if you were buying more from one person than one person ought to have to sell.”

“I’m an honest businessman who loves his country. I donated a car to the scrap drive, a Lincoln. Repeat what you just said and I’ll take you to court.”

“We’re all friends here,” Zagreb said. “Right, Tino?”

Tino said nothing.

“This is horseshit.” Canal leaned on his big hands on the table. “You own a roadhouse up on Square Lake, B-girls and gambling. I got a friend with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department owes me a favor. It’s a big enough favor to make him forget how much the county prosecutor wins there every month. You got six betting parlors on Gratiot alone, a whorehouse on Cass, and the pinball concession on the West Side. I ain’t swung an axe since Repeal. I need the practice.”

Orr had to lean over to look at Zagreb. Red spots the size of poker chips had appeared on his cheeks. “There’s a leash law in this town,”

The lieutenant kept his hands in his pockets. “You forgot numbers.”

“I didn’t forget numbers,” Canal said. “I was saving them for last. We ain’t had a good bum sweep in five years. Your runners could get swept up for vagrancy, by accident of course. We’ll kick them loose as soon as you vouch for them, but them little paper bags they carry might get lost in Property. No big deal, I guess. How much dough can you carry in one of them little bags?”

“Who’s this Polack working for, himself or the department?” Orr picked up another mussel.

“I ain’t a Polack. I’m Ukrainian.”

“Fucking communist.”

Canal took his hands off the table. Tino took a step away from the wall. Zagreb patted the big man’s arm. Canal relaxed.

“The sergeant’s a Republican,” Zagreb said. “Anyway, the commies are our friends now. The common enemy, you know?”

Orr got open the shell, looked at the meat inside, then laid it on his plate. He tested the point of the knife against the ball of his thumb, then laid the knife down too and reached for the moist towel.

“I’ll ask some questions around,” he said. “I can’t promise anything.”

Zagreb said, “That makes two of us.”

A
FTER LEAVING
R
OMA’S,
M
AX
Zagreb said good night to the others and went back to his office at 1300 Beaubien. There was no one waiting for him in the two-room apartment on Michigan Avenue, and he didn’t feel like going back and listening to dance music from the Oriole Ballroom. He sublet the apartment from a marine whose last address was in Sydney, Australia, depositing his rent the first of every month in an escrow account at the National Bank of Detroit. On the same day he made his monthly mortgage payment to Detroit Manufacturers Bank to maintain the two-story house he’d moved out of on Rivard last December. His wife’s complaint, he remembered as he shuffled through the photographs of the slashed and bloated corpse that had surfaced in Flatrock Monday, was that he never discussed his work.

The office had even less of the personal touch than the apartment, but at least it was supposed to be that way. His Academy class picture, just another stamped-out face in an oval among three rows of them, hung crooked between a war map and a bulletin board shingled three-deep with FBI wanted circulars, most of them featuring espionage suspects. A Stroh’s beer case stuffed with files stood atop a scratched green file cabinet—overflow from the drawers—and a black Royal typewriter with a wide document carriage occupied a metal stand next to his yellow oak desk, a scrapyard of arrest forms, stacks of copies of the
News, Times,
and
Free Press
turning orange, and unwashed coffee mugs serving double duty as paperweights. There was a coffin-shaped Airline radio with a police scanner and a steel wastebasket bearing a label reading
WARNING
—
VOLATILE MATERIAL
that he had inherited from the room’s former occupant, who had appropriated it from the Chrysler tank plant before shipping out to England. Someone had pasted a cutout of Betty Boop to the inside of the frosted-glass door, then tried to remove it with a scrub brush, leaving only the huge eyes and chronic pout. Something about it reminded him of the KILROY WAS HERE cartoon on the sidewalk in front of the house where Anna Levinski was killed. He’d thought about finding a brush and finishing the job, but had decided against it. A little reminder couldn’t hurt.