“I never did.”
“Bull. The marine outside said he heard a lot of yelling. He drank your liquor, but you weren’t friends. You blew your top and then you blew his.”
“We got loud, yeah. We were drinking, swapping stories. If he says it was anything else he’s a liar.”
“You and the marines just don’t get along, do you?”
“Go to hell.”
* * *
Zagreb left them alone; he wanted to defend Canal, and that was bad police work. The commissioner ambushed him in the hall.
“He’ll crack when we get the results from the carbon test. He can’t claim he was on the firing range. The logs show he hasn’t been in since yesterday. We’ve taken his shirt, on the off chance he had time to wash his hands after firing the round and before the guard got through the door. It will show powder residue if his skin doesn’t.”
“What do we know about the guard?”
Witherspoon shook his head. “You’re barking up the wrong tree there. His father served with distinction in World War One. His older brother flew in China with Chennault; he was shot down by the Japanese. His younger brother died fighting in the Spanish Civil War. His own record’s clean, before and after his enlistment. He ships out for the South Pacific next week.”
“Test him?”
“We did. Negative.” The commissioner pursed his lips; he seemed to consider the expression sympathetic. “Any good cop wants to stand by his partner. Lord knows Canal’s not the first member of this department to go bad.”
“Go to hell.”
“What?!”
“I’m quoting Canal. That’s what he told Powers. You’re going to have to convict him without a confession.”
Witherspoon glared, but let the explanation stand. “We may not get the chance. I just heard from Washington. The War Department intends to claim jurisdiction. The penalty for murdering a soldier in time of war is execution.”
“No one’s been put to death in this state since eighteen thirty.”
“I’m sure that’s the line Governor Kelly will take. But federal law supersedes Michigan’s.”
A uniform approached carrying a sheet of paper. He wore bifocals and a hearing aid; the city was scouring the retirement rolls for personnel to fill the empty desks. Witherspoon took the sheet, read it, and handed it to Zagreb. Carbon tests on Canal’s shirt had discovered traces of spent gunpowder on the right cuff. He’d discharged a firearm while wearing it.
* * *
In the interrogation room, Canal read the report and smacked it down on the scarred table. He wore an old sweater Burke had given him to replace his shirt. Burke was the closest to him in size, but the sleeves were three inches too short and his shoulders strained the seams. “It’s a mistake. I ain’t fired a piece since yesterday at the range.”
Zagreb asked him when he’d changed his shirt last.
After a poleaxed moment, a grin spread across the sergeant’s broad face.
“Day before yesterday. I get three days out of ’em now before they go to the laundry. Our boys need the soap.”
“You just now thought of it.” Powers, the Homicide man, showed his teeth.
“Ask Mrs. Chin. She says the war’s putting her out of business.”
“It won’t prove anything. The tests don’t show how long the powder’s been there.”
Zagreb picked up the report. “This is a lot of powder for that size gun. More like a police thirty-eight.”
“They don’t show caliber either.”
“Get the murder weapon up here from ballistics.”
Powers straightened to his full movie-star height. “You giving orders now? We’re both lieutenants.”
“When’d you make rank?”
“October twelfth, nineteen forty.”
“December twenty-second, thirty-nine. Get your butt down there, Lieutenant, and don’t use the stairs.”
After Powers left, pulling the door shut hard behind him, Canal said, “It was November of forty. I was at your party.”
“He’s Witherspoon’s man. He doesn’t have the brains to check my file.”
Powers returned and slammed the pistol on the table. It was less than four inches long from action to muzzle, nickel plated, and looked like a toy.
“Pick it up,” Zagreb told Canal.
“Don’t get any hot ideas about shooting your way out,” Powers said. “It isn’t loaded.”
Canal picked it up with his big paw. “You check it?”
The Homicide man blanched a shade.
Zagreb said, “Point it at Powers.”
He did so. The Homicide man, pale still, rested his hand on his empty holster from reflex. Sidearms were banned from the interrogation rooms.
“Pull the trigger,” Zagreb said.
“I can’t.”
“That’s an order, Sergeant.”
“I mean I can’t. Look.” He opened his hand. The two lieutenants leaned closer. Canal’s finger was too thick to fit inside the trigger guard.
* * *
The marine guard’s name was Norden, like the bombsight. He had a clean jawline, transparent blue eyes, and the standard short jarhead haircut. There wasn’t so much as a loose thread on his beautiful blue uniform. His hands were well kept, the nails rounded and buffed lightly. He sat straight as a fence rail behind the window in the interrogation room Canal had just left.
Witherspoon turned from the window and glared at Canal. All the Horsemen and Powers were present. “You checked both this man’s hands?”
Powers nodded. “He didn’t do it, sir. It isn’t even his gun. Why carry a weapon you can’t use?”
Zagreb tilted his head toward the window. “If Norden could hear voices inside the hotel room, he could hear when Canal went to the bathroom. That’s when he made his move.”
“But why?”
Burke said, “Let me have a crack at him, Commissioner.”
“I’m afraid you mean that literally. Detective McReary?”
As the young man entered Interrogation, Burke nudged Zagreb. “Thinks he’s a pussycat.”
“It’s all those freckles.”
They listened over the intercom. Norden shot to his feet.
“Sit down, soldier.” McReary’s tone was iron.
“I’m a marine, not a soldier.”
McReary shoved him with both hands. Norden lost his balance and fell into a chair. When he started to get up, the detective bent and grabbed both his arms above the biceps, paralyzing them. He leaned in close. “How’d you get along with Eddie Natalo?”
The suspect gave up struggling. “Pretty okay.” He had a parade-ground tenor. “We didn’t talk much. I only met him today.”
“How about Sergeant Canal?”
“We didn’t talk at all. By the look of him, we could use him to dig foxholes.”
“Why didn’t you search him for weapons?”
“That was a snafu. I assumed he’d been disarmed. His holster was empty.”
McReary straightened. He slid a hand over his prematurely bald head and rested it on top. He seemed unsure of his next move.
“Powers, take his place,” Witherspoon said. “He’s too green.”
“With all respect, Commissioner, there isn’t a green man on the squad.”
McReary asked Norden where he was from.
“Litchfield, Minnesota. Population thirty-one hundred.”
“Don’t get many Hispanics up there, I’m guessing.”
“Corporal Natalo was the first I ever met.”
“Too bad you didn’t get to know him. Man like that, a hero, could’ve given you some tips about how to behave in combat.”
“I got plenty of those in training.”
“This early in the fighting, those drill sergeants can’t have his experience. The military probably would have wasted him on a war bond drive.”
“I guess he’d’ve made a good salesman. He didn’t have an accent or anything.”
“Accent?”
“You know. Like those Mexican bandits in westerns.”
McReary leaned back against a wall and folded his arms. “You’re a middle son, right? Your older brother was killed in China and your kid brother got it in Spain. Your dad was wounded at the Marne. I imagine his boys made him proud.”
“Jack did. He took out two Zeroes before they shot him down. Pop was just plain mad over Andy. His first day out, a Fascist sniper put one in his head from a tree two hundred yards away. He never had a chance.”
“Fascist? One of Mussolini’s thugs?”
“One of Franco’s. Some lily-livered spick that couldn’t even look him in the eye when he murdered him. Just like one of those banditos.” Norden’s face was dark.
“Well, there are spicks and Hispanics, just like there are micks and Irish. Eddie Natalo was a credit to his ancestors. If Jack and Andy had come back, they’d be proud to have their picture taken with him at a bond rally. Your pop too.”
“He’d’ve spit in his face! Just like Andy would’ve done if that yellow guinea came down out of his tree and faced him like a man. They’re all the same. One of our boys got himself killed helping those men on the ship and Natalo took the credit.”
“Who told you that?”
“No one had to. Look what one of them did to my little brother!”
McReary pushed himself away from the wall and unfolded his arms. “You’re out of uniform, fella.”
Startled, Norden glanced down at his tunic.
“Where are your gloves?” McReary asked.
* * *
“Tell me about the gloves,” said Witherspoon.
McReary said, “Yes, sir. A marine’s not in full dress uniform without white cotton gloves. I took a squint at the manual of arms when this thing started, to bone up. They had it at the recruitment center. I barely made it back out in civvies.”
The Four Horsemen and the commissioner were in the squad room. Witherspoon was two feet inside the door, a personal best, and Zagreb and Burke straddled chairs. McReary had risen when Witherspoon came in. Canal, wearing a fresh shirt under his blue suit, sat on one haunch on a windowsill looking down on Beaubien. Lieutenant Powers was absent, supervising Norden’s confession.
Zagreb held out a report rolled into a funnel for the commissioner to take. “Scrub team found the gloves in a bin behind the hotel. I make it he took them off while everybody was crowding into the murder scene and stuffed them in the waste receptacle of a maid’s cart. They tested positive for spent powder. I told him his prints were on them.”
Witherspoon stared at the sheet. “I don’t see anything here from the fingerprint team.”
“They weren’t needed. You can’t lift a decent print from fabric.”
“Ah.”
“It was premeditated,” Zagreb said. “When Norden drew the guard detail, he bought the piece, or had it, intending to use it in place of his service automatic, which would’ve nailed him to the crime. Canal coming to apologize was an answer to a killer’s prayers.”
“How can a man hate a stranger enough to kill him?” asked the commissioner.
“That’s one for the military. They trained him. We’re going to have to beef up Homicide once this war’s over.”
When Witherspoon left, Zagreb asked Canal why the long face. “You should be celebrating. Open that window and fire up one of those torpedoes you smoke.”
The sergeant didn’t move. “I liked Natalo. You drink with a man, it’s the same as fighting with him; you find out what he’s made of. I don’t think I’ll go out on the Latin beat next time, Zag. You can suspend me for insubordination if you want.”
“Me, too,” Burke said. “I don’t like the music anyway.”
Zagreb stuck a Chesterfield between his lips. “What about you, Mac?”
“I’ll go if you order me, Lieutenant.”
“Uh-huh.” He snapped open the Ronson. “Let’s find out where Ricky and the Klan went after we rousted ’em from the Book-Cadillac and bust heads.” He spun the wheel and got a flame for the first time.
— SOB —
Sister
“Keep the change.”
Sob Sister
Arabella Lindauer was the highest-paid sob sister on the staff of the Detroit Times. Her boss, William Randolph Hearst, had said that if you assigned Arabella to a fire with nothing worse than a singed dog for human interest five minutes before deadline, she’d pound out a story that would draw tears from a stone. Her five-part series on the Lindbergh kidnapping had failed to win a Pulitzer, but Walter Winchell had choked up while quoting from it on the air (which she said was better).
A self-described spinster (although she had no shortage of suitors), she never left home or the office in anything other than her uniform: pillbox hat, print dress, chunky-heeled shoes, and of course white cotton gloves. She bought these by the box and seldom wore a pair more than once; red lipstick gravitated to them no matter how careful the wearer and didn’t wash out. She carried clutch purses with just enough room for her pencil and pad, a roll of nickels for the telephone, her compact and rouge, and the keys to her Hudson on a ring attached to a set of brass knuckles.
For a time, she’d been seen about town in the company of Lieutenant Max Zagreb of the Detroit Racket Squad, but when they’d exhausted all the ballrooms and picture shows and sat down to talk, they discovered that they lived at cross-purposes. It was his job to jail predators with a gun and hers to free them with an adjective. They parted on grounds of self-preservation, but not with finality. When the two-burner range, the radio, and the post-nasal drip of the faucet in the apartment kitchen surrendered their charm, one would call the other and they would go out for Clark Gable and a Coney Island. A palpable lack of a social life was the one thing they had in common.
This was a matter of career alienation, not unattractiveness. She was a handsome woman of thirty, with a trim waist and an abundance of auburn hair, he slightly older, whipsaw lean, large in the forehead—the sign of a thinker—and had a lazy smile like Dan Duryea’s. One knew them only briefly before realizing that his eyes didn’t always smile when his mouth did, and that she spoke the way she wrote, with the main subject on top and all the other details following in descending order of importance, in the shape of an inverted pyramid. Satellites from outside their solar system didn’t stay long in their orbit.
On the day the marines landed on Guadalcanal, Arabella and Zagreb went to see Mrs. Miniver at the Broadway-Capitol, with a Betty Boop cartoon and newsreel footage of the Japanese in New Guinea, and lingered over coffee in the J.L. Hudson cafeteria while waiting for their hamburgers to digest. Zagreb was first to break the comfortable post-prandial silence.
“I ought to call in. Some draft dodgers might celebrate this Guadalcanal business by busting up a tavern.”
“Isn’t that the uniform division’s baby?” She slid a Lucky between her lips.
He snapped his Zippo under it. “Most of them are in Pearl and the North Atlantic. We all have to make do, isn’t that the line?”
“The only line I know is the fake seam girls draw up the back of their legs till the Air Corps stops using nylons for parachutes.”
“That never makes sense to me. How do you show you’re helping the war effort by pretending you’re not?”
“Nothing about this war makes sense. We’ve got Hitlers right here.”
“You better watch who you say that to.” He kept his voice light, but his gaze swept the nearly deserted room for junior J. Edgar Hoovers, gray men in pinstripes with notebooks.
“I’m talking about that snake Frankie Orr.”
“What’d he do, sell you a bum set of tires?”
“He can make a million off the black market for all I care. I interviewed a GI on leave from the Aleutians who said he helped set fire to a thousand gallons of gasoline just to de-ice a runway. Rationing’s a joke.”
“When’s the piece come out? I’ll read it.”
“You already did, if you saw yesterday’s paper, b
ut you didn’t see that bit. The old man blue-pencils anything that might remind people he was an isolationist before December seventh. The rest was columns of sludge about the GI’s tearful reunion with his teenage bride. They’d been separated a whole six weeks when he got sent home with a nasty case of frostbite.”
“What are you beefing about? That’s your specialty.” He lit a Chesterfield.
“I can do it in my sleep. I’ve gotten all I can out of kittens and Christmas Eve car crashes and one-legged prom queens. I want to quit making people reach for the Kleenex and make them look for a stamp instead, to write their congressman. Frankie’s hired guns have made more widows locally than Tojo.”
“The war’s young. Give Tojo a chance.”
“I want to write about him.”
“Who, Tojo?”
“Don’t play dumb, Zag. You know who I mean.”
“So write about him. Who’s stopping you?”
“He is. I can’t even get in to see him at that restaurant where he hangs out, a public place. But you can.”
“You want I should ask him for an interview?” He’d forgotten how much she amused him when she wasn’t being exasperating.
“You’re planning a raid. Take me along.”
He’d forgotten, too, how thin the line was between amusement and exasperation. “Who told you that?”
“My hairdresser. She’s dating a member of your squad.”
“Which one?”
When she shook her head he said, “There are only four of us, Belle. I’m not dating a hairdresser, Canal’s saving himself for a girl from the Old Country, and Burke talks nookie like Cesar Romero speaks Spanish: no hairdressers recently. That leaves McReary. By the time that little mick takes off his hat and shows his bald head, it’s too late. He’s already charmed you half into the sack. It’s Mac, isn’t it?”
“I’m not saying, but don’t blame him. He didn’t spill the beans. Women are smart and dumb, same as men. This one isn’t dumb. She’s spent enough time with him to know when he’s strapping himself down for a rough ride.”
Detroit Is Our Beat Page 3
