“So it was a frame.”
Witherspoon sat back and unpinched his spectacles. “What is it you want, Zagreb? Half my men are overseas and I can’t keep a secretary; they all want to build tanks for Chrysler. I don’t have time to listen to you gripe.”
“You just made my case. You’re wasting four experienced men on a piss-ant detail that Uncle Sam’s Whiskers should’ve been doing in the first place.”
“The last time I let in Hoover’s boys, it took a can of Flit to get them out.” He twirled his glasses by their ribbon, lips pursed. Then he put them back on and reshuffled his papers. “Here. A job for experienced men.”
Zagreb hesitated before taking the sheet, a letter typed single-spaced on heavy bond. He didn’t like the commissioner’s constipated little smile.
* * *
For fifteen seconds after the lieutenant stopped speaking, the only sound in the squad room was Canal mashing his cigar between his teeth. They had their hats on—matching pearl-gray fedoras, to avoid bopping one another with blackjacks when they waded into brawls—because the nights were beginning to get cool. They were alone except for an officer flipping through files in a drawer. He was ten pounds too heavy for his uniform and five years past retirement. Witherspoon was desperate for manpower but too cheap to restore the man’s sergeant’s rank. The room was filled with empty desks and typewriters covered like canary cages.
“Bodyguard duty,” spat Burke. “That’s actually a step down from watching fake Nazis.”
Canal said, “I can’t stand Sinatra. He sings like olive oil coming to a boil.”
“He’s okay,” McReary said. “Next girl I have, ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’ will be our song.”
Canal snorted. “If you ever had a girl, you’d know you don’t get to pick your song. It’s the one that’s playing the first time you plant one on her.”
“Your luck, it’ll be ‘Thwee Iddie Fishies.’” Zagreb held up the letter. “It’s from Frankie’s manager, asking for police protection when he plays the Fisher next month. He’s been getting anonymous calls promising to lay a lead pipe across his throat if he doesn’t agree to pony up five grand.”
“Worth a shot, if it improves his singing.” Canal blew an improbably long jet of smoke out the open window next to him.
Burke said, “Hell, anybody can drop a nickel. Some soda jerk’s sore because his broad’s in love with that twig.”
“The manager thinks it’s the McCoy. Remember that lug tried to throw acid in Mae West’s face?”
“Serves him right for aiming at her face,” Canal said. “It’s a publicity stunt.”
McReary was still fuming over that crack about his love life. “I’ve had more girls than you’ve had cheap cigars. You fall in love with Hedy Lamarr every time you go to the can.”
“I told you, her picture came with the wallet.”
Zagreb said, “You’re both Errol Flynn, okay? Let’s get back to business. Frankie’s the job, that’s it. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had it up to here with beating up on ham radio operators with Lawrence Welk accents. What’s so wrong with show business? Maybe we’ll get to meet Ann Sheridan.”
“We’ve got a couple of weeks,” said Burke. “I’m thinking we might wrap this one up before we have to dive into a mob of obsessed fans. Don’t this sound like just the kind of lay that another Frankie dear to our hearts would love to sink his teeth into?”
Deep contemplation followed. The Greektown bar where they hung their hats off-duty had a picture of Francis Xavier Oro on the dartboard. Frankie Orr had his paws on every automobile tire and pound of butter that passed through the local black market. If he’d attended high school in Palermo, his classmates would have voted him Most Likely to Succeed in Organized Crime.
“I’d like five minutes with that greaseball in the basement,” Canal said thoughtfully. “I’d swap it for my pension.”
Burke chuckled. “Big talk. Someday you’ll punch a hole in Witherspoon’s face and your pension’ll be dead as Valentino.”
Zagreb lit a Chesterfield with his Zippo. “There isn’t a man in this room won’t be on the dole the minute the boys come back from Berlin and Tokyo; the commish will see to that. Meanwhile, let’s have some fun with our Frankie.”
* * *
Orr’s office of record stood high in the Buhl Building, an Art Deco hell designed by a firm of chorus boys from Grosse Pointe, with a checkerboard of ebony and pickled-birch panels on the walls and a chrome ballerina hoisting a lighted globe on his glass desk. He sent someone there to pick up his mail and read it in his private dining room in the Roma Café, a Sicilian restaurant in which he owned part interest; that was speculation. His name didn’t appear on the ownership papers.
A freestanding sign in front of the dining room read PRIVATE PARTY. As Canal lifted it out of their path, a man nearly his size took its place. His suit coat sagged heavily on one side.
“’S’matter, junior, you only read the funnies?” Canal said.
Zagreb smiled at the man. “Hey, pal, you like Vernor’s?”
“Never heard of it.”
“Out-of-town,” Zagreb told the sergeant. “Frankie rotates ’em like tires so they don’t get lazy. It’s not his fault he don’t know we’re famous.” He flashed his shield. “Boss in?”
“No.”
“Then what the hell you doing here?” Canal swung the sign at his head.
The bodyguard tried to roll with the blow and reached under the sagging side of his coat. McReary, stationed on that side, slid the blackjack out of his sleeve and flicked it at the back of the man’s hand as it emerged. The big semiautomatic pistol thumped to the carpet. Burke kicked it away.
“Just like Busby Berkeley,” Zagreb said. “Show some manners. Knock on the door.”
The bodyguard, bleeding from the temple, ungripped his injured hand and complied. When a muffled voice issued an invitation, he grasped the knob. “What’s Vernor’s, anyway?”
“Just the best ginger ale on the planet,” Canal said.
“I like Canada Dry.”
Canal swung the sign again. Zagreb caught it and took it away.
Frankie Orr, seated in a corner booth, closed and locked a strongbox on the table and looked at the bodyguard without expression. “Call New York. You’re still on the payroll till your replacement gets here. I don’t want to see you after that.”
The man left, closing the door. Orr turned his gaze to Zagreb. The gangster was handsome, if you liked the gigolo type. He trained his glossy black hair with plenty of oil, practiced his crooked Clark Gable smile in front of a mirror, and the man who cut his silk suits at Crawford’s swore he hadn’t added an inch to his waistline in ten years. “I wish you’d put a leash on that St. Bernard of yours,” he said. “There’s a war on. Good help’s scarce.”
“He’s still a pup. I don’t want to break his spirit.” The lieutenant spun a chair away from a vacant table—they all were, except Orr’s—and straddled it backward, folding his arms on the back. “Sinatra’s coming, did you hear?”
“I bought a block of tickets. I didn’t know you followed swing music.”
“Der Bingle for me. Crosby was here when he came and he’ll be here when he’s gone. That might be sooner than we think. That goon on the Manhattan subway, before you came here; didn’t you beat him to death with a lead pipe?”
“I never killed nobody, not with a lead pipe or a gun or a custard pie. If that’s why you’re here, you need a warrant. Small talk, Sinatra and Ish Kabibble, won’t do it.”
“They don’t call you the Conductor because you shook a stick in front of the Philharmonic, but that’s New York’s headache. One less of you heels back East doesn’t annoy me one little bit. Some joker’s making noise about doing plumbing on the Voice’s throat, maybe right here in town; that does. Since you both like the same weapon I thought we’d start here.”
“You’re barking down the wrong hole, Lieutenant. I don’t piss in the wind, especia
lly when it’s blowing from Jersey. You know how Sinatra went solo?”
Burke said, “We ain’t deef. Willie Moretti got Tommy Dorsey to release Frankie-boy from his contract by twisting a .45 in his ear. Every little girl in Hoboken sings about it skipping rope.”
“I heard it was a .38,” Orr said. “Anyway, the organization has plenty tied up in Sinatra. Anything else you heard is bushwah.”
“His manager don’t think so.” Zagreb got out a cigarette and walked it back and forth across his knuckles. “I believe you, Frank. It’s easy enough to find out if you bought all those tickets, and everybody knows you’re cheap. Any loose cannons in your outfit? Some driver thinks he didn’t get his end smuggling a truckload of Juicy Fruit past the OPA?”
“You got to do better than that if you want me to say I got anything to do with the black market. Say, where’d you learn that trick?” Orr stared, fascinated by the lieutenant’s sleight of hand.
“I used to deal blackjack before I got religion. Okay, so when it comes to waving Old Glory, you’re Kate Smith. But say you weren’t, and one of your boys wanted to cross you. Who’d it be?”
“I clean up my own messes. Listen, there’s a showgirl at the Forest Club’d think that thing with the cigarette’s swell. I can get you a deal on a set of whitewalls if you teach me how to do it. Pre-war, never used, so there won’t be any trouble over stamps.”
Canal drew his shadow over the booth. “Frankie, I think you’re trying to corrupt us.”
“Signora Oro didn’t raise any dumbbells, Sergeant. It’s a friendly trade is all.”
Zagreb stood and put the Chesterfield back in the pack. “Keep your nose clean, Frankie. We don’t want to have to come back and blow it for you.”
Out in the public area, the lieutenant stopped.
“You boys wait in the car. I forgot my hat.”
They left him. None of them looked at the hat on his head.
He found Orr putting the strongbox in a wall safe. The gangster shut the door, twisted the knob, and covered it with a print of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. He jumped when he turned and saw Zagreb. “Jeez, you fellas are light on your heels. I thought you all had Four-F flat feet.”
“Relax, Little Caesar. If we wanted to shake you down, we’d just bust holes in the walls with sledges. It occurred to me you don’t trust my boys not to go running to Jersey if you gave me the time and temperature in front of them.”
“I know you since the old days,” Orr said. “You hauled me downtown with ten cases of Old Log Cabin in the back seat. I offered you half a C-note, but it was no go. I got my cargo back, you got foot patrol for a month. You’re a sucker cop, but a right gee. You could take a certain bellyacher off my neck, but what’ll you tell the others when you come back with a name?”
“I’ll say I taught you the cigarette trick.”
“Jersey’d laugh ’em clear back to Detroit if they went to them with a story like that.” Orr gave him the Gable grin. “So how do you do it without bending the butt?”
Zagreb shook his head. “Can’t risk it, Frankie. You couldn’t resist showing it off if Jersey asked, and there goes your cover. I can’t have your blood on my hands.”
The grin shut down. “Serves me right for trusting a cop.”
“Now give me the name before I bring the boys back in with the toys from the trunk.”
The others were sitting in the unmarked black Chrysler with the windows down to let out the reek from Canal’s cigar. The lieutenant got in beside Burke at the wheel and said, “Lyle Ugar. Drops a grand a month to his bookie on a dock foreman’s pay.”
“What, no whitewalls?” McReary said.
* * *
They discussed using the California Hotel, the flea hatchery where the squad conducted unofficial interrogations, but since a street thug wasn’t likely to squawk to the commission they took him to the basement at 1300—Detroit Police Headquarters—still wearing his coveralls, artfully smeared with grease in case his parole officer came to call. Ugar had gin blossoms on his nose and brass knuckles in his pocket. “My good luck charm,” he said.
Canal tried them out on the prisoner’s abdomen.
Ugar spit up on the sergeant’s shirt. Canal, mildly irritated, straightened him back out with his other fist.
“Slow down.” Zagreb yawned. “You got a train to catch?”
“I’m stuck with this shirt for the duration. My Chinaman charges double to scrub out puke.” But the big man took pity on Ugar and shoved him gently into a kitchen chair soaked deep with sweat and worse. The impact tilted the front legs off the floor. They hung for a second, then came back down with a bang.
McReary was sitting on a stack of bulletproof vests left over from the Dillinger days, holding a wrinkled sheet of onionskin. Generations of mice had chewed holes in the vests and pulled out steel wool to snuggle their young. “Says here in your personnel record you were a pipe fitter on your last job. Take any pipes with you when you left?”
“That’s what this is about, pilfering from the job?” Ugar hugged his stomach. A violet knot marred the line of his underslung jaw. “Christ, I’ll donate ’em to the scrap drive.”
Canal placed one of his gunboats against the foreman’s chest and pushed. A building less solid would have shaken when chair and man struck the floor.
Zagreb lit a cigarette, watched the smoke spiral toward racks of sports equipment untouched since December 1941. “What kind of music you listen to, Lyle?”
“Wh-what?” Ugar’s lungs were still trying to reinflate.
“I like Bing Crosby. ‘Wunderbar,’ but I don’t guess we’ll be hearing that one for a while. How about you fellas?”
“Polka,” said Canal. “Oom-pah-pah.”
Burke said, “Pass. I’d rather hear the fights.”
“Kay Kyser,” McReary said.
The other three groaned.
Zagreb said, “See, we’re making conversation. What do you think about this skinny kid has the little girls’ bobby sox rolling up and down? Sinatra.”
“Never heard of him.” Ugar remained sitting in the chair with his back on the floor and the soles of his Red Wings showing. “I hocked my radio when the U-boats was taking down all our ships. My kid brother was on one.”
McReary showed Zagreb the personnel sheet.
“No next of kin, says here,” Zagreb said. “It’s dated July nineteen thirty-nine.”
Canal bent over Ugar, grabbed the back of the chair in both hands, and stood it back up, man and all.
Burke touched the sergeant’s arm. “Take five.”
When Canal stepped aside, Burke snatched Ugar by the front of his coveralls and lifted him out of the chair. From the shrieking it seemed he had a fistful of chest hair.
Zagreb said, “Burke’s favorite cousin went down aboard the Arizona. Maybe you were mistaken about that brother. I had an imaginary friend once. Bet it was yours you were thinking of.”
The prisoner, his face close enough to the officer’s to scratch himself on stubble, made a sound that was not quite human.
The lieutenant nodded. “What I thought. You probably took one on the noggin when you roughed up Reuther and Frankensteen at the overpass and haven’t been right since. Go easy on him, Detective. He’s a veteran of the labor wars.”
Burke released his grip, letting Ugar drop back onto the chair. He wiped his palms on his shirt. “Strikebreakers all got cooties.”
“I don’t think there’s scientific proof,” Zagreb said. “This isn’t the USO, Lyle. We wouldn’t lay off you if you had a brother and he flew a plane up Hitler’s ass. When you’re not goldbricking on the loading dock or busting heads for Harry Bennett, you’re pouring antifreeze on the horse feed at the fairgrounds, fudging the race results for Frankie Orr. He passed you over for a juke route you thought you had in the bag, so you decided to shake Sinatra down for case dough and incidentally tick off the Conductor and the people he answers to back East.
“Look at me when I’m talking t
o you, Lyle,” he said.
Canal and Burke moved toward Ugar.
“I don’t get you, honest!” He held up both palms. “I wouldn’t know Frankie Orr if he sat down next to me on the streetcar.”
Zagreb said, “If you know his history with streetcars, you know you’re better off with us. We can let him handle it, if you like. If you don’t know each other, we’re just wasting our time.”
Ugar’s face paled beneath the broken blood vessels. Then he breathed in and out deeply.
“It ain’t my lay. I’m strictly heavy lifting: Somebody says go here and screw up a guy, I go there and screw up a guy. I don’t ask how come. The one time I went out and did something on my own, plotted out a juke route in neutral territory, they took it away and gave it to somebody else. I was sore, sure, and I guess I wasn’t quiet about it, but that’s as far as it went. I never took one on the noggin so hard I’d commit suicide.”
The lieutenant blew smoke at him and crushed out the butt on a floor strewn with them like fall leaves.
“This one needs more tenderizing, Sergeant. He’s still too tough to chew.”
“And us fresh out of red points.” Canal, in shirtsleeves with the cuffs rolled back, dark half-moons under his armpits, squeezed his sausage fingers into the brass knuckles and flexed them. “Face or body?”
Zagreb told him to surprise him.
* * *
They dumped Ugar in third-floor Holding and convened in the toilet, all booming marble with white pedestal sinks and urinals a man could stand in upright. Canal soaked his swollen knuckles in cold water and splashed it on his face. “I’m getting rheumatism. If this was the military they’d put me in for a Purple Heart.”
“Ugar made me mad when he sucker-punched you with his nose,” Burke said. “I almost took a hand, but it was your ball.”
McReary adjusted his hat in the mirror. “He’s not our guy. He’s too dumb to dial a phone.”
“The dumb ones and the smart ones are the hardest to crack,” Zagreb said. “He’s a thousand miles from smart, but he ain’t dumb enough to clam up and swallow medicine he don’t have coming. He’s been on the other end of plenty of beatings. He knows how many things can go wrong.”
Detroit Is Our Beat Page 8
