Detroit Is Our Beat

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Busting Four-F shirkers’ heads on Woodward isn’t a pleasure cruise.”

  “You don’t spend days planning those raids.”

  He shook his head. “If it’s true, I couldn’t take the chance. If you got hurt, the commissioner would have my head. He’s wanted it ever since he took the job.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  “Then again, you might get one of us hurt. I’m short a dozen men as it is.”

  “For old times’ sake?”

  “No soap. It’s this job or storming some beach. Damn sand gets in everything.”

  She said something uncomplimentary, dropped her cigarette butt into her cup, and left. He pushed the cup out of his line of sight while he finished his Chesterfield and his coffee. That brown floating debris could put him off nicotine and caffeine at the same time.

  * * *

  McReary was in his twenties, fair and freckled, and self-conscious about his bald head, a souvenir of scarlet fever, or one of those other diseases that stalked children between wars. The rest of the squad called him Baldy only when they were sore at him. Zagreb, on the rare occasions when the young man had his hat off, thought he looked sleek and predatory, like a hood ornament.

  He found Mac at his desk, tapping out a report with two fingers on a Royal typewriter of Spanish-American-War vintage, his snap-brim tipped forward to shield his eyes from the glare of the gooseneck lamp. He struck a wrong key when the lieutenant spun a chair and straddled it backward to face him. The detective third-grade was a capable cop, but all his confidence in his abilities evaporated in the presence of the commander of the Four Horsemen.

  “Anything?” Zagreb jerked a thumb at the loudspeaker mounted on the wall. It was connected directly with Dispatch.

  “Not a peep, L.T. For us, anyway.”

  Officer Burke, seated nearby, said, “Some criminal genius busted a window in the A-and-P after closing and made off with a dozen cans of peas. Went right past a display of Maxwell House coffee to get to ’em. Canned peas ain’t rationed yet.”

  “That’s because it’s unpatriotic to poison the troops.” Sergeant Canal, perched on one massive ham on a windowsill, exhausted cigar smoke out over Beaubien. The rest of the squad had petitioned him never to fire up one of his bargain-basement specials without ventilation handy. Zagreb’s second-in-command was a big man, as light on his feet as Sonja Henie on the ice, and all muscle under a layer of fat, like a grizzly. “Me, I’d make a beeline for the freezer.”

  “Not everybody can carry a side of beef under one arm.” Burke, who was determined never to be second-in-command of anything, was big also, but not by Canal’s standards. He’d compensated by cultivating a mossy growth of black hair that stuck out of his cuffs and grew above his collar, where it blended with his around-the-clock shadow.

  “I could manage six, seven capons,” McReary said. “I’m wiry.” He grinned nervously. Zagreb was studying him.

  The lieutenant addressed the others without looking away. “Why don’t you two boys get some air?”

  The others exited without comment. Every man on the detail knew Zagreb seldom disciplined a member in front of the others. This decision was both diplomatic and practical: All three were armed.

  “How’s your sex life, Mac?”

  McReary’s face flushed deep copper.

  “Okay, I guess. No complaints, anyway.”

  “I went out with a lady barber a couple of times. She talked the thing to death in the end. They sure can gab up a storm.”

  The color drained from the young man’s face.

  “What’s Agnes been up to?” he asked.

  “Agnes? Seems to me a blade like you can do better than an Agnes.”

  “She didn’t even know I was a cop till she saw the gun. I had to tell her.”

  “She’d know that anyway. We’re good copy, we make the front page whenever there’s nothing doing overseas. How much you tell her about Express?”

  Sound travels across empty space. With most of the desks in the squad room vacant and a skeleton police force riddled with paid informants, the Horsemen had followed the lead of the U.S. military by assigning code names to their activities. On the street, Frankie Orr was known as “the Conductor,” for an old murder aboard a streetcar. Operation Express was in place to break up his black market organization.

  “I never told her a goddamn thing, L.T. I don’t have so many miles, but I’m no rookie.”

  “Rationing’s a war priority. You know they shoot you for treason.”

  “Where are you getting this?”

  Zagreb watched him closely another moment. Then he sat back and tipped his hat past his crown.

  “Some women can read a man,” he said. “It takes time to learn how to keep your nerves under your vest. In the meantime, try to stay away from gossipy dames. The Times has it.”

  “Holy smoke!”

  “It’s all right, the reporter’s a friend of mine. But just till this one’s in the can, go to the pictures by yourself. Betty Grable’s more fun to look at when you’re stag.”

  “Okay, L.T.” McReary took his hat off, mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, and resettled it. “L.T.? Would you really have me shot?”

  “Hell, no. Uncle Sam needs the bullets. I’d do it myself.”

  * * *

  When he came to Detroit, at the height of the booze wars, Francis Xavier Oro had been touted as one of the new breed, applying modern business methods to the rackets. That meant quieter murders and a fairer system of graft. He’d expunged the Sicilian from his name, replaced his loud suits and silk shirts with bankers’ colors and white button-downs, and expanded his activities to embrace gambling, drugs, labor unions, and other difficult-to-obtain goods and services after liquor resumed flowing legally. When America entered the war and the OPA restricted traffic in meat, eggs, butter, gasoline, and automobile tires, Frankie Orr had annexed the black market to his territory without a single assassination.

  It was better than hooch; better even than girls and heroin. In Grosse Pointe, where defense-plant profits were put up in barrels to mellow, a porterhouse steak on the table and a new set of whitewalls on the Packard translated into instant prestige.

  “I seen—saw—it coming when Schicklgruber muscled in on Munich,” he said. “Man of vision, that’s me.”

  “That’s I,” corrected his English tutor.

  “Forget it. You was one of them, you wouldn’t be teaching school.”

  Orr procured his inventory exactly as he had in earlier days, through hijacking, bribery, and midnight deliveries from Canada by way of the Windsor Tunnel, the Ambassador Bridge, and boat landings in the City of Monroe and Detroit Beach, a flea-speck just north of there, where the grease spread farther.

  Although not all the way to the Detroit Racket Squad.

  On a crickety, mosquito-thick evening in August 1942, Officer Burke shoved the foot-feed to the firewall of the two-year-old Chrysler Royal, muttering curses like Popeye as he twisted the wheel this way and that to keep the tires from snatching in the sand drifted across the highway from the beach. He’d disliked the heavy sedan from the day it was issued, but was the only one of the Horsemen who could get the best out of it.

  “Take it easy, Burksie.” Sergeant Canal gripped the ceiling strap in the back seat and took the cigar out of his mouth to stare at the spot where he’d bitten through the wrapping. “They don’t make new brakes for cars no more, just tanks and airplanes.”

  “What’s your beef? I ain’t touched the brakes since Dearborn.”

  “Once in twenty miles won’t hurt,” said Zagreb, seated beside him in front.

  Burke took the hint and slowed down.

  He passed the turning, switched off the lights, and coasted to a stop on the gravel apron in front of a bait-and-tackle shop that had been boarded up since the Bank Holiday. The four got out and gathered at the trunk, where the lieutenant handed out flak jackets and heavy artillery: a sawed-off shotgun for McReary, a Thompson
for Canal, and a flare pistol for himself. Squat-barreled Police .38s rode on their belts.

  McReary watched the sergeant fitting a fifty-round drum to the machine gun. “Just once I’d like the Tommy.”

  Canal grinned in the trunk light. “Not till you pack on the pork, junior. When this starts to spit it’ll jerk you around like a turd in a twister.”

  “Who you calling a turd, you big piece of—”

  Zagreb whistled sharply between his teeth. “Save something for the enemy.”

  They walked down to the beach, Burke cursing at the sand he shipped in over the tops of his wingtips. Between them and the spot where boats landed loomed a canvas-shrouded bandshell, once host to the Casa Loma and Les Brown orchestras but now a place for winos to shelter and teen couples to grope. Farther out, an ancient dock, landlocked by a receding waterline, decrepitated under a shoe-heel moon. McReary pumped a round into the shotgun and joined Burke under its cover while Zagreb and Canal ducked under the canvas of the bandshell. The sergeant used his jackknife on the rotted fabric to create observation posts. This made a V-shaped firing perimeter with the landing in the middle and the two men under the dock closest to the action.

  Canal sat with his back against a timber, cradling the Thompson in his lap. “What if they check out this place?”

  “It’s a bandstand. Play ’em a concert on that fiddle.” Zagreb remained standing.

  “It ain’t like the Conductor to take a chance with the feds and the Mounties both at once. This ain’t the dry time, when it was only against the law on this side.”

  “He’s not shipping from Canada. He’s following the shore up from Toledo. He knows there are guardsmen at the state line.”

  “His snitches are better than ours. I hope yours wasn’t pulling your leg.”

  “He better not have. He’s looking at three to five on a granny warrant if Frankie comes by land instead of sea.”

  “Frankie coming along, you think?”

  “Nah. He’s probably polishing off a mess of spaghetti at Roma’s.”

  “What’s the cargo, meat or tires?”

  “One or the other. He only deals gasoline when he’s strapped for cash. One stray round during a hijack and he’s out some men he can’t spare. General MacArthur’s got all the best.”

  “Right now I’d settle for two or three more of our own, second best or no.”

  “Can’t risk it. You might have noticed that what we got left to draw on isn’t USDA Choice. Department’s calling back cops it dismissed for grafting.”

  “They’re the ones should be drafted. If this foreign business drags on, I wouldn’t give a Confederate nickel for what we end up with.” The sergeant chewed on his cold cigar.

  “Maybe you should enlist and finish it quick.”

  Canal smacked the deck of the bandshell. “What, and give up showbiz?”

  The night wore on. The wind freshened off Lake Erie, blowing away the mosquitoes and carrying a snatch of studio laughter from a radio program. It could have come all the way from the Canadian side.

  In a little while the ground trembled beneath a heavy piece of machinery shifting gears down the highway. The big man gathered his legs under him, tightening his grip on the submachine gun.

  “Keep your pants on. Could be a bread truck.” But the lieutenant forgot his craving for a Chesterfield.

  The diesel rumble increased. When the vehicle downshifted to make the turn, they felt it in their testicles. Canal said, “If that’s bakery products, they’re making ’em out of cement.”

  “Now.”

  The sergeant rose and they crept to the hole in the canvas, taking turns peering through it.

  A rounded radiator grille appeared in the moonlight filtering down onto the highway. Two slits of electric light winked on briefly from blackout lamps, locating the twin tracks in the sand leading to the shoreline. The cab’s divided windshield was dark; not so much as a dashboard bulb illuminated the occupant or occupants. Behind it, sliding into line as it followed, the trailer cut a square blank out of the scatter of lighted windows belonging to what remained of the beach community on the other side of the pavement. The truck was painted dull black from stem to stern.

  “Listen,” said Zagreb.

  A wheezing sound rose above the engine when it slowed to a purr.

  “Refrigerator truck,” said the lieutenant. “It’s not tires.”

  Canal said, “Hot damn. I’m throwing a barbecue Saturday.”

  The truck stopped. Gears changed. It backed around until the end of the trailer was pointed toward the lake. Air brakes whooshed and two men climbed down from the cab.

  The one from the passenger’s side started toward the bandshell.

  Zagreb whispered. “Don’t move a muscle.”

  A flashlight snapped on. The man trained the beam on the ground, an obstacle course of driftwood, broken beer bottles, and trash from Canada. A square pistol showed in the reflected glow.

  “Get ready.” Zagreb thumbed back the hammer on his revolver.

  Canal stepped back from the opening and raised the Thompson to his hip.

  The man holding the flash and semiautomatic came within ten feet of the shell.

  “Gus!”

  He stopped walking, hesitated, then turned and trotted back toward the truck.

  The two men inside the canvas relaxed.

  A new chugging sound reached them, laboring against the offshore current. The word from the underworld was Frankie Orr had bought a decommissioned World War I minesweeper and refurbished it for cargo. When the frosty moonlight limned the sharp, Dick Tracy nose of the prow, Zagreb put away his .38 and tugged out the flare pistol.

  The chugging slowed. A thousand-candlepower spot slammed on aboard ship and swept its blinding shaft across the beach. Zagreb and Canal withdrew farther into shadow.

  The shaft made two more passes, combing sand and structure, then stopped.

  Abruptly the light went out. For a moment, green-and-purple blossoms swam before them, spoiling their night vision. They resumed recycling oxygen. They hadn’t been spotted.

  For an instant, the light had illuminated a second pier, this one jutting twenty feet beyond dry land—new construction, added since their last visit. As the craft approached, the pitch of the engines changed; the props were reversed. After a moment they stopped. Silence then, except for water lapping the hull as the ship continued under its own momentum. It ghosted alongside the pier, and now the men watching saw human silhouettes above the railing, guiding the man at the wheel with gestures.

  Water splashed; an anchor released. The ship yawed against the pull of the cable, steel plates scratching submerged sand. It stopped just short of beaching itself.

  A pair of silhouettes clambered over the railing and leaped to the pier, landing with a double thump. More maritime business while they caught a pair of lines cast over the side by a third silhouette, pulled them taut, and maneuvered the pliable craft closer to the pier. They tied them to rings attached to posts.

  A hatch lowered, creating a gangplank. The man on deck vanished, to reappear (Canal and Zagreb guessed) among two others walking down the ramp carrying stout cartons on their shoulders.

  “Shoot,” murmured Canal. “I was counting on sides of beef and pork.”

  “Smaller cuts. Chops and tenderloins.” But the lieutenant was troubled. Something was missing. What?

  The sergeant stepped toward the opening. Zagreb put a hand on his arm.

  “Let ’em finish loading. It’s a sin to let fresh meat spoil while our boys are eating Spam.”

  “I’m worried about Burke. He’s the impatient type.”

  “Mac’ll keep him tame. That’s half the reason I put him on this detail. Learned it from an old horse trainer. For some reason, putting a goat in with a stallion keeps it from kicking down the stall.”

  “Mac’s a goat?”

  “Don’t tell him. He’s too good with that scattergun.”

  But Zagreb was only half listen
ing to himself. That crack about meat spoiling had told him what was missing.

  “No vapor,” he said. “That boat ought to be smoking from dry ice.”

  Canal peered at the minesweeper. There was nothing issuing from the open hold. “Maybe it’s refrigerated, like the truck.”

  “Yeah.” Only he doubted it. “Well, we came all this way. Take the safety off that chopper.” He stepped into the open and fired a rocket into the night sky.

  * * *

  “I’m still blind in my right ear.” Canal twirled a thick finger inside it.

  McReary said, “Try cutting loose with a twelve-gauge under a dock.”

  “Shut up, both of you.”

  The lieutenant was testy. The flare he’d shot off still lit the beach, a miniature sun in a white sky. The men they’d arrested sat on the beach leaning forward, each with a wrist shackled to an ankle, a Four Horsemen specialty that discouraged flight.

  There were eight men in cuffs, with the truck driver, the driver’s partner, the men who’d helped with the unloading, and the two armed guards, who’d dropped their guns and surrendered when Canal and McReary fired warnings close enough to kick sand over their shoes. Burke had pistol-whipped the man with the semiautomatic when he’d drawn down on the squad. He sat listless, one hand raised to keep his brains from leaking out of his cracked skull.

  The ship’s captain and what remained of his crew had slipped through the snare. Props still reversed, they backed away from shore, unmindful of bullets thudding against the hull. Once outside range, they’d turned and gone all-ahead full, out to sea.

  A half-dozen stout cardboard cartons lay split open on the beach where the detectives had dumped them, their contents scattered: paperbound copies of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Caesar’s Conquests, Treasure Island, and the works of William Shakespeare; servicemen’s editions of literary properties long in public domain.

  “Not one stinking Edgar Wallace,” complained Burke. “No wonder we’re losing.”

  There wasn’t so much as a pork chop in the whole cargo, or anything else remotely resembling contraband.