“Can I open up now?” The fat manager blew his nose. The dust they’d stirred up had set all of them sneezing.
“What’d we miss?” Zagreb asked McReary.
The third-grader shrugged and said something, but a grinding of gears and clanging of metal from outside drowned him out.
“Garbage day!” The lieutenant ran for the stairs.
A prehistoric Mack truck was pulling away from the alley behind the building, its chain drive clattering, when they came out. Burke, moving faster than any of the others had ever seen him, lunged after it and leapt onto the running board, pounding on the door with his shield in his fist. The driver braked, almost throwing him off.
By the time they climbed down from the truck bed, the squad was plastered with coffee grounds, potato skins, and sundry other matter best left mysterious; but Zagreb was grinning, holding a long wooden implement in a hand wrapped in a handkerchief.
“What is it?” asked McReary.
Canal was beaming too. “Before your time, rook. We shut this place down the first time in ’37 for gambling. That’s one of the rakes the dealers used to scrape in the cash.” He pointed to the wooden teeth, stained dark and still glistening. “That what I think it is?”
“Griselda Simone’s blood type, or it’s back to the beat for me,” Zagreb said. “And if we’re lucky, somebody’s prints on the other end.”
The fire door to the Ruby Lounge banged shut. The lock snapped. The manager had been standing in the doorway. Zagreb barked at McReary, who launched himself around the building. He came back three minutes later, panting.
“Out the front and who knows where?” he said. “Tub of lard like him, who’da thought he could run like Seabiscuit?”
“Call box on the corner,” Zagreb told Canal, who went that way, fishing for his key. The lieutenant smacked the young detective’s shoulder. “No sweat, Mac. What’s he going to do, join the navy?”
* * *
When the man from the lab called Zagreb, he sounded put out. “That set of prints you gave me didn’t match the ones on the rake.”
“They have to belong to the manager. I got them from his file.”
“No dice. Latents on the handle were too small. Ten to one they’re a woman’s.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
He held up a hand, staying the others from asking questions, and started going through desk drawers—that wartime habit of plopping themselves down in front of any old deserted work station was getting to be a pain. Finally he found the picture postcard and peered at it closely. “Your eyes are younger, Mac. What’s it say?” He handed it over, pointing at the postmark.
McReary studied it, passed the card back. “St. Clair Shores.”
“Caption says San Francisco.”
“She was pulling your leg. She stuck it in a mailbox five miles away. Friend of yours?”
“Cops don’t have friends.” He picked up the receiver again and asked the long-distance operator for the War Department.
* * *
Shirley Grabowski had been reported AWOL when she failed to report in California for deployment to Alaska. The fingerprints the War Department sent over matched the prints on the handle of the wooden rake that bore Griselda Simone’s blood type on the teeth. The information was given to state police throughout the Great Lakes region and the FBI.
Chester “Lungs” Nelson was brought in, and when Lieutenant Zagreb effectively told him everything that had happened from Lungs’s first contact with the WAC, offered no resistance. Disapproving of a “sister” fraternizing with a white man—it had been going on for some time, without Red Lot’s notice—he’d brought the affair to Dugan’s girlfriend’s attention, but swore he’d had nothing to do with the murder. Zagreb was inclined to believe him, especially after Canal had offered to break the trumpeter’s jaw in so many places he’d never be able to blow so much as a kazoo. With Shirley still at large, that was where the matter rested until a distant cousin of the fat manager’s turned him in to the Toledo Police for failure to pay rent on the use of his couch.
Ohio extradited. The manager, who’d put on more weight while he was shut in, confessed to doping Jerry Dugan’s bottle and looking the other way when Shirley Grabowski entered the Ruby and went upstairs. Under what the News and the Times called “fierce questioning” and the Free Press called “the Horsemen’s brutal third degree,” he insisted that he thought she was planning only to rough up the girl once Dugan was in no condition to prevent her; like Lungs, he hated race-mixing and was interested solely in employing a woman’s jealousy toward the solution.
Burke, puffing heavily with his shirtsleeves rolled up to his armpits, said, “What’d you think the rake was for, friendly game of craps?”
“She didn’t carry it up. It was in the room. The girl who comes in to clean uses it to hold the door open when she sweeps up. I never even missed it till it showed up in the trash. Why do you think I panicked? The broad went out by the fire escape; she must’ve ditched it in the can in the alley. I see the body, I’m going to say anything? I already got a record.”
* * *
The story had everything the fact-detective magazines needed to shove Fifth Column spies off the covers. Shirley’s picture went up in the post office next to Tokyo Rose’s, and Walter Winchell broadcast her description on the radio. When Max Zagreb let himself into his apartment after a night at the Roxy, he’d just seen her face in a newsreel, so when he pulled the chain-switch on the light and saw her sitting in his shabby armchair, he thought at first he was daydreaming.
“Hello, Shirl. How’s life on the lam?” He threw his keys on a table.
“Not as glamorous as advertised. A cop ought to have a bobby-pin-proof lock.”
“What’s a cop got to steal?” He saw she’d traded the trim uniform for a print dress that might have fit her before she lost weight, and her ankles looked thick above shoes with chunky heels. Her shoulder bob needed a good hairdresser and her face was haggard. She’d been right about the military frock; it had given her a kind of beauty she’d never really had.
But then, he was looking at a murderess now. He kept an eye on the handbag she was clutching in her lap.
“Can you see your way clear to fixing me a rickey?” she asked. “I haven’t been in a bar in weeks. People get a drink in them and try to collect the bounty. It’s up to a thousand now. Be twice as much if I were a man.”
“I never saw the sense in that. Women are more dangerous. No Coca-Cola in the icebox, sorry.” He took out his flask, seeing her hands flinch on the bag when he went for his pocket.
She hesitated, then pried one loose to accept the flask. As she grasped it, he snatched the bag from her other hand. She made a feeble gesture after it, then relaxed as he undid the clasp and removed a small semiautomatic. “For me?” he said.
“You did a lousy job keeping Jerry out of trouble. But no.” She opened the flask, swigged, coughed. “Needs the Coke.”
“Be happy with the hospitality. What kind of friend shoots herself in a friend’s house? Ever try scrubbing blood and brains out of mohair?”
“I was saving it for later, in case you tried to arrest me. I came to explain. Homely girl thinks she’s landed a cute guy—”
“He said you’re a knockout.”
“I don’t believe you, but thanks.”
“Nuts to that. He wasn’t even happy with you when he said it. Some guys don’t like being mothered.”
“How about you?”
“I’ve got a mother. She doesn’t like me much. Drink up and let’s go downtown.” He slid the pistol into his side pocket.
“Whatever happened to old times’ sake?”
“You killed a girl, Shirley.”
“A woman always blames the other woman, you ought to know that. I’m sorry I did it, though. I didn’t plan the—the mutilation, but when I saw that rake—” She shuddered. “Anyway, it wasn’t her fault. Who could resist Jerry?” She must have read the answer on his face, b
ecause she changed the subject again. “What do you hear from him, by the way?”
“Red Lot gave him the axe. Not for what happened. A better trumpeter got sent home from the Pacific with a hickory leg. Somebody told me Jerry joined the Coast Guard. They’re not so particular about heart murmurs. If he’s got the brains God gave a cricket he’ll throw the horn overboard. As a musician he’ll make a swell sailor.”
“He isn’t Harry James, is he?”
“He isn’t even Harry Langdon. And he can’t drink. If it weren’t for Tojo and Hitler he’d be pumping gas in Garden City.”
“What’s the song called? ‘I’m Looking for a Guy Who Plays Alto and Baritone and Doubles on a Clarinet and Wears a Size 37 Suit’?”
“If Bing didn’t sing it, I don’t know it.”
* * *
“Manager copped, accessory to assault and battery,” Zagreb said, drumming his fingers on the phone in his lap. “They promised him two years, including time tacked on for fleeing and eluding.”
“What about Lungs?” McReary asked.
“Nolle prosse. They never had much of a case.”
Burke said, “That should make Red Lot happy.”
“I doubt it. Lungs put in his notice. USO offered him a tour if he beat the rap. Red already lost his gig at the Ruby. I heard he’s taking the band on the road, opening for Jean Goldkette.”
A jury rejected Shirley Grabowski’s plea of temporary insanity, based on the planning involved: the doped whiskey, the arrangement with the manager, the phony postcard to establish an alibi. Judge James Tolliver Blake sentenced her to life in prison, but her lawyer won a bid for appeal.
“Good thing you ditched her when you did,” Canal told the lieutenant. “You dodged a bullet in more ways than one.”
“Yeah. Cover for me, will you?”
“Sure, Zag. What’s up?”
“Social call.”
Zagreb greeted Shirley in the women’s facility at the Detroit House of Corrections, where she’d been moved pending a new trial. The matron, whose husband had deserted her for a cigarette girl in the Wolverine Lounge, had pulled strings to get her a jail uniform that fit. In it, she was, Max Zagreb admitted to himself ruefully, a dish.
— THE —
Elevator Man
“God help Omar Bradley when that bunch ships out.”
The Elevator Man
John Barrymore had shed blood at the California Hotel.
Then again, maybe not. After destroyers and DeSotos, lurid legends were Detroit’s major export.
If the story was true—and an old report at Receiving Hospital of the release of one “Jack Smith” with minor facial lacerations and twenty-three stitches in his right arm was one point in its favor—he was the only guest of his stature ever registered there.
Naming the hotel for the home of Hollywood had failed to attract the glamorous horde the original owner had counted on. When Mary Pickford or Buster Keaton came to town, they had generally stopped at the Pontchartrain, or accepted the hospitality of one of the auto pioneers in Grosse Pointe.
Barrymore may have holed up in the California to elude private detectives hired by his wife. A woman named Ruby LaFlor was booked for soliciting there the same night (rumor had it) the star of Don Juan drank too much and walked through the Art Deco glass door of the shower in his suite; but if the events were connected, the publicity value was doubtful.
In any case, that was twenty years in the past. If anyone could shed light on the affair it was Hank, the elevator operator. The hotel staff insisted that the men who’d built the shaft in 1915 had taken his measurements before making the car.
Dan McReary wasn’t curious enough to ask Hank, because their average conversation ran four seconds and varied not at all:
“How’s it going, old-timer?”
“Good as can be expected, punk.”
These exchanges always left the detective third-grade feeling privileged. As far as he knew, the gaunt old man never opened his mouth in the presence of any other member of the Racket Squad. He sat stone-faced on his low stool with his gaze straight ahead and his fist on the lever, wearing what was likely the same brass-buttoned tunic and pillbox hat that had been issued under Woodrow Wilson. From year to year nothing changed, except the length of hair growing out of one of his big pendulous ears and his license in its frame on the elevator wall, renewed on the same day annually.
“What about it, Sarge?” McReary asked once. “Ever get a rise out of old Hank?”
Sergeant Canal worked his cigar, a lonely channel marker bobbing in the sea of his big Slavic face. “I got a grunt out of him when I gave him a portable radio last Christmas. I figured he’d want to keep up on the war, but I never saw it again. Probably sold it on the black market. Now I think about it, it might’ve been just a burp.”
“Maybe he doesn’t like to be reminded. Maybe he lost a grandson or somebody overseas.”
“His great-grandson’d be too old even for the Civil Defense. I think he ran Lincoln up to his box at Ford’s Theater.”
“You know that doesn’t make sense.”
Officer Burke, the biggest man on the detail when Canal wasn’t around, chuckled from the bed he was stretched out on in shirtsleeves and stocking feet. “Canal never would’ve made citizen if he didn’t take the test next to a smart Mexican.”
“I was born here, you Irish S.O.B. Some of us got birth certificates.”
“What’s it say next to Father? ‘Player to be named later’?”
Canal shrugged and took out his resentment later on a suspect in a rape.
The California strained a budget already drawn thin by absent department personnel, scattered from Guadalcanal to the Black Forest. The skeleton crew left behind to maintain order patched up the cigarette burns in its uniforms and cannibalized junkyards to keep official cars rolling. Automobile manufacturers were too busy building warplanes and submarines to replace the aging vehicles on the road.
But Sergeant Canal, detectives Burke and McReary, and Max Zagreb, their lieutenant, considered the expense necessary. Cases broke more efficiently without meddling from the brass at 1300 Beaubien, police headquarters. When requisitions were slow, they pooled their paychecks to make rent.
“This time when the bean-counters come through, let’s add room service,” Burke said. “I’m sick of running out for liquor.”
McReary poured a cup of chicory from the pot. “Of all the gall. I’m the one does the running. The clerk in the store on the corner thinks I’m a soak, and I never touch the hard stuff.”
“Boo. And while I’m at it, hoo. Go cry in your Orange Crush.”
“Keep your shirt on, Mac,” Zagreb said. “We’ll split up the errands, soon as you make a collar on your own.”
“How am I supposed to do that, when we’re all stuck together at the hip like Siamese quadruplets?”
They were the Four Horsemen in the press. The pro-administration Detroit News used the term in the heroic sense, while the reform-conscious Free Press thought it appropriate to a quartet of barbarians. Hearst’s Times straddled the fence. The Herald, a radical sheet, pushed for a clean sweep from the mayor on down to the city pound. Commissioner Witherspoon was waiting for a consensus before deciding whether to disband the squad. The fate of the four’s draft exemptions rested on the outcome.
“Although God help Omar Bradley when that bunch ships out,” Witherspoon confided to his cronies at the Athletic Club.
McReary didn’t pursue the Hank subject, and eventually forgot about the discussion. As the youngest Horseman with the least seniority, he had his hands full fetching and carrying for the others when he wasn’t contributing to their impressive arrest record. When not much was happening in Europe and the Pacific, they sometimes managed to open for World War II in newsreels.
It was the elevator man himself who stirred his memory.
One day—it was around Thanksgiving, McReary recalled later, because Perry Como was still singing about autumn leaves, but th
e department stores were already filling up with electric trains and monkey-fur coats—the car came to a sudden stop between floors, with a shudder and a clankity-clank that sounded like a severed cable flapping free: JUNIOR DETECTIVE DIES IN FREAK FALL was the headline that flashed to mind.
But the elevator didn’t drop. Hank let go of the lever, which was pushed all the way around to STOP. He looked at his passenger with a glint of life in his matte-finish black eyes.
“Near wet yourself there, young feller. Five floors ain’t nothing to old Betsy. Her sister took fifteen in Frisco in ought-six and they put ’er right back on the line with a fresh coat of paint. Not that the six folks that died appreciated it.”
“You were in the quake?”
“No, I missed that one. But us lift-jockeys know all the stories. I could curl your hair.”
McReary lifted his hat to show his young bald head.
A bony shoulder lifted and fell, but the material of his uniform stayed shrugged. “Think what you save on Brilliantine. I wanted a minute of your time. Betsy’s slow, but she ain’t that slow. The poor schnook you’re working over upstairs won’t notice you’re late.”
“You got the wrong idea, old-timer. That kind of police work went out with bathtub gin.”
“Says you. I can fetch you a jug in ten minutes. I seen them jitterbugs go up full of vinegar and come back down two hours later spittin’ blood. You can’t pull the wool over these eyes, nor get out of me what they seen. A good elevator man is like a priest, only without the dog Latin.”
It was more words than he’d heard the old man speak since before Pearl Harbor. “So what’s the scoop?” McReary asked. “Selling raffle tickets on a turkey?”
“You mean a pigeon bloated up with water. Government drafted all the turkeys and sent ’em overseas in cans. I’m offering you a cut of a million.”
Detroit Is Our Beat Page 15
