Detroit Is Our Beat

by Loren D. Estleman

“You forgot me,” Canal said. “I didn’t know any of them birds. And you left out that truck driver.”

  “No, I didn’t. It was our stakeout, all of us as a squad, put Charlie Potts in a cage up in Marquette for hijacking a load of black market sugar back in forty-two.”

  Burke sat down, hoisted his foot onto the table. “You weren’t listening, kid. Ragtime Charlie barbecued himself when he hit that telephone pole.”

  “How do we know it was him if he’s barbecue?”

  “His glass eye didn’t burn,” Burke said. “One of his fellow brats poked him with a pencil in sixth grade.”

  “A lot of guys got glass eyes since Pearl Harbor.”

  Silence settled like a blanket of snow.

  Zagreb broke it. “It’s too screwy not to make sense. Four men. A squad. Once they’re in cuffs we should sue ’em for stealing our act.”

  * * *

  They were stumped at first for a connection that would hold up in court.

  All four were ex-convicts, but they hadn’t all been in the same pen at the same time. Worse, neither Emmanuel Schultz—“Boom-Boom” to the press—and neither Charles nor “Ragtime Charlie” Potts ever served in Jackson, and both Marquette and the Ypsilanti State Mental Hospital were unfamiliar territory to Jimmy Ray Floyd and Oscar “Mail Train” Jefferson, who’d fed his wife Mirabelle a lethal dose of cyanide when she taunted him one too many times for getting himself cut from the Motor City Mambas football team.

  Then Lieutenant Max Zagreb remembered the Erskine Street Social Club.

  It was a blind pig owned and operated by an ex-con named Pop Doheny, catering exclusively to felons on parole, who were prohibited by the terms of their release from patronizing establishments where liquor was served or fraternizing with other convicted criminals. Since the dive was unlicensed anyway, the risks were no worse than even, and the Detroit Police Department left it alone as long as disturbances were kept to a minimum (cue sticks and fists, okay; guns, knives, and broken bottles, not so much); allowing it to remain open provided a convenient place to start looking for fugitives. If the four had ever made contact, that would be a likely spot.

  And it was dark enough in the corners for a cop whose face was known to his quarry to set up a stakeout.

  Burke’s lame foot rendered him useless for tail work, and Canal made too big a black hole to overlook, so Zagreb and McReary took turns nursing beers in the gloom, with the others sitting in the Chrysler outside under a streetlamp that had been burned out since before the war. With air-raid drills taking place every few nights, there wasn’t any hurry to replace the bulb.

  McReary got lucky at the end of the first week.

  He’d committed all the mug shots to memory, and carried copies just in case, but even career criminals rarely resemble photos taken under the bright institutional lights they shunned from habit. Chance timing alone placed him on post the night Jimmy Ray Floyd, the sharpshooter he’d arrested personally, swaggered in, threw a leg over a barstool, and ordered Kentucky rye.

  The detective third-grade leaned forward when the bartender, pouring, lowered his head and moved his lips close to Jimmy Ray’s ear. Floyd nodded, sat back in a nonchalant pose, then downed his whiskey in one jerk, threw a coin on the bar, and left. McReary abandoned his beer untasted and followed.

  He gave the high sign to Canal—spelling the injured Burke behind the wheel—and the sedan crept alongside the curb, headlights extinguished. When Jimmy Ray folded his long lanky form into a 1939 Studebaker Champion, McReary swung open the Chrysler’s rear door and got in beside Burke. It was a crisp night, but all the windows were open to dispel the smell of fresh paint.

  Canal gave the Studebaker two blocks before switching on the lights.

  “Probably meeting some broad,” Burke said. “You can only count on luck so far.”

  “So we brace him and take him back to the California for the full-body treatment,” Zagreb said.

  “That gin-slinger too,” said McReary. “He’s the one gave him the message.”

  Canal grunted. “Bartender? I’d as soon try to crack a coconut with a feather duster.”

  “Doesn’t mean we can’t try.”

  “Stick to being the idea man,” said Zagreb. “Leave the heavy lifting to the gorillas.”

  Burke said, “I resemble that remark.”

  Jimmy Ray made a left onto East Jefferson Avenue, then swung right onto Riopelle, a street of square block and brick buildings with gridded windows reflecting the moonlight in flat sheets, no illumination inside. Canal followed, dousing the lights.

  “Cripes, I love the warehouse district,” he said. “Rats big as chimps and every once in a while a body in a burlap sack.”

  The street ended at the river, where the choppy surface broke the moon into a school of silver minnows. Jimmy Ray left his car by the curb and entered a warehouse, sidling around a rusty barricade made of heavy-gauge steel designed to look like chicken wire. It had been peeled back at one corner as if with a can opener. McReary reached for his door handle.

  “Not yet,” Zagreb said. “We’ll give him a couple minutes to settle in.”

  “Give us the slip, you mean.”

  “In peacetime I’d say yeah. Cars are too hard to come by to let one go to the impound.”

  “What if he boosted it?”

  Canal snorted. “Who’d steal a no-nuts machine like that? It’s only got six cylinders.”

  “Sergeant, go on past and swing around at the end, pointing back toward town. I don’t like dead ends.”

  “Yes, sir.” The Chrysler edged around the parked car.

  “It’s a trap!” Burke’s voice was hoarse. He was looking through the rear window at a tall tractor cab turning into the street from an alley, towing a flatbed trailer stacked high with wooden crates lashed down with cable. Moonlight struck the white lettering on the door:

  CONWAY DEMOLITION

  “It’s a rolling bomb.” The lieutenant’s tone was eerily calm. “Pile out, and draw your pieces.”

  The sedan was still rocking to a stop when all four doors swung wide and they assumed trained positions: McReary and Burke crouching behind the specially installed steel door panels, revolvers aimed through the open windows, wrists braced on the sills; Zagreb and Canal standing, gun arms braced atop the front doors. The truck swung the rest of the way into the street, gears grinding, the engine winding up into the cry of a big cat, headlights blinding, one set of wheels up on the right-hand curb to clear the Studebaker parked on the other side. The driver’s-side door popped open.

  “Let ’em have it!”

  The echo of Zagreb’s order was lost in the roar of heavy calibers. One of the truck’s headlights went dark, the windshield collapsed in big jagged sheets, puckered holes appeared in the side of the open door. The driver assumed the shape of a bulky shadow against the dim glow of streetlamps on the Jefferson end of the street, one foot on the running board, one hand on the wheel. He leapt free—directly into a grouped ball of four leaden slugs that catapulted him backward and sent him rolling and bouncing down the pavement, just like McReary’s theater ticket.

  * * *

  But the truck was still coming, weaving from side to side with no one steering and the irregularities in the curb and pavement twisting its wheels this way and that. The Four Horsemen dove for the sidewalks on both sides; Burke delivered an extended and impressive medley of high-pitched curses when his bad foot struck the curb and he fell headlong across crumbling concrete. McReary saw Canal fling himself across Zagreb, thinking, The son of a bitch is using himself for a shield, just like last time.

  Not that anyone or anything could protect any of them once that truck slammed into something solid and its load went off.

  * * *

  Then the left front tire struck a lopsided cube of old cement, a satellite broken off from the curb, and turned, its mate on the right side turning with it. The cab hopped all the way up onto the sidewalk, scraped a fender along the brick building on that s
ide, showering a rooster tail of sparks. Canal and Zagreb scrambled to their feet and out of the truck’s path.

  For one agonizing instant, the flatbed trailer swung the other direction, snapping like a whip toward the Studebaker, its explosive cargo shuddering in its webwork of cables; McReary squeezed his eyes shut and, comically, stuck his fingers in his ears, his department piece dangling by its trigger guard from the right index.

  He heard only the thunder of the truck’s motor, the continued screaming of metal against brick.

  When he opened his eyes, the trailer had shifted back the other way, obediently following the cab in a straight line along the sidewalk.

  McReary, Zagreb, and Canal stood, turning to follow the retreating truck with their eyes. Burke, seated on the curb with his legs splayed in front of him, propped himself up higher to watch. The iron guardrail at the end of the street crumpled like tinfoil. The truck bent in the middle, the cab rolling over the sandbags piled to hold back the Detroit River when it rose; then the cab disappeared, the view blocked by the trailer and its load. Then that, too, vanished.

  A second passed, disguised as a week. Then the splash.

  It was as loud as everything else connected with the truck, and the wave it made rose stories tall, its top curling white, the hollow of water beneath glittering like a Christmas tree, reflecting every light in the city. It kept curling forward, taking a bow, then struck the street with a nasty splat that soaked the Four Horsemen from hat to heels.

  * * *

  They reasoned later the four thugs had drawn straws. Jimmy Ray Floyd was the bait, Ragtime Charlie Potts the hammer. Whether the others were even present remained a mystery. The survivors weren’t talking.

  “We weren’t the only ones figured the Erskine was the place to stake out,” Zagreb said. “As crooks went, they weren’t any smarter than the usual run, but four half-wits make two decent noggins.”

  The border guards on the Canadian side of the Ambassador Bridge, alerted by radio by the U.S. guards, stopped Jimmy Ray driving a stolen Hudson coupe, the day after the bomb squad rescued fifty cases of water-logged dynamite from the river, each stick capped by an expert.

  Ragtime Charlie Potts, resurrected from the dead thanks to a case of mistaken identity, stayed there this time, with a hole in his chest the size of a softball and a crushed skull when he landed on the street.

  Canal said, “Seems he just walked right into the lot at Conway Demolition, found a load ready to go, and drove out the front gate. Stopped just long enough to sign the bill of lading with a name belonging to a driver who was out with the sniffles. We’ll sweat those out of him in the California Hotel.”

  Zagreb said, “What would we hold him on? Taking a fin to call in sick?”

  The Department of the Army did Detroit the favor of turning over Manny Schultz, the putative Mad Bomber of Madison Heights, after he tried enlisting in Springfield, Ohio, under a fictitious name and his fingerprints were checked in Washington.

  “I hear he asked for a mine detail,” McReary said.

  Mail Train Jefferson, long sought by the FBI for interstate flight to avoid prosecution, didn’t make it out of Michigan this time. Responding to complaints of an offensive odor by guests in a residential hotel in Dearborn, the desk clerk found him in his bed, dead about a week. The coroner discovered enough arsenic in his system to ground the Luftwaffe.

  “That’s that.” Zagreb hung up the telephone. “Some guys can sure hold a grudge. You’d think they’d find something better to do with a war on.”

  Canal said, “Maybe they knitted socks for the troops when they wasn’t trying to put us on ice.”

  “Who cares? My neck’s feeling better. How about you, Mac?”

  “Tape came off yesterday. Took my first deep breath in two weeks.” He looked at Canal, striking a match off the seat of his pants. “I saw what you did, you know.”

  The big sergeant hoisted his bushy brows, lighting a cigar. “What’s that, little-bit?”

  “Down by the river. Just like the last time, only then it was me safe under a tub of lard.”

  “Bushwah. I can’t help it if guys keep getting in the way when I’m saving my skin.”

  “My foot’s killing me,” Burke said. “Sprained it all over again when I tripped on the city of Detroit. Thanks for asking.”

  Zagreb played with a Chesterfield. “Forget it, Officer. Mac’s the man of the hour. That was straight thinking there in Records, figuring out it was four instead of one. You ought to think about becoming a detective.”

  “Go boil your head,” said McReary. “Sir.”

  — TIN —

  Cop

  “If they don’t want guys threatening to jump off buildings, why do they put ledges on ’em in the first place?”

  Tin Cop

  “Well, hello, there, Officer O’Shea. Long time no see.”

  McReary looked around, but whoever Burke had addressed was nowhere in sight. “Mac” was slimy with sweat, his shirtsleeves rolled, and his hands black as a stove. As the junior member of the Detroit Racket Squad, he’d been tagged with cleaning the basement storage room at 1300, Detroit Police Headquarters, along with the big detective, who was being punished for failure to feed the coffee kitty: “We’re supposed to pay for that ersatz swill?” had been his defense. “I thought somebody followed the Mounted Division around with a shovel.”

  “You’ll wish you had one soon enough,” Lieutenant Zagreb had said. “The last annual spring cleaning was in nineteen thirty-nine.” It was 1944.

  The handsome Italianate architecture ended at ground level. Beneath was a concrete enclosure as big as an underground parking garage, with a steel post every few yards, sweaty concrete walls, and piles of broken and discarded police equipment in the storage room. Not so long ago it had been a dungeon, where Burke said reluctant suspects were “given the Ameche.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, you know Don Ameche played Alexander Graham Bell. What you do, you get an old-fashioned crank telephone, clip the wires to their nipples, and every time you don’t like the answer to a question, you give the crank a turn. It’s like putting their nips in a light bulb socket: like the sixty-four-dollar question, only the prize is you don’t scream and wet your drawers. But somebody beefed, so now it’s just a root cellar without the roots.”

  There were mountains of broken chairs, shards of blackboard slate, parts of moldy uniforms, piles of bulletproof vests—the old-fashioned kind with steel plates sewed inside quilts made of wire mesh—cartons of ancient arrest reports chewed up by mice and deposited here and there in confetti balled into nests, leaky coffee-pots, a couple of crank telephones (McReary hadn’t really bought that story until he came upon these), bales of Police Gazettes, assorted girlie magazines, sawed-off shotgun barrels, silhouette targets with holes punched in them, a forty-six-star American flag, and crates of tear-gas canisters, among other detritus made unidentifiable by age and decay.

  “Mind them rusty canisters,” Burke said. “Drop one, we both get off this detail double-quick, except we won’t enjoy the personal time.”

  Carefully, McReary started stacking the crates. “What about rats?”

  “You got something against unrationed meat?”

  “This is uniform work. Why don’t they get someone in a blue bag?”

  “Most of ’em are too busy cleaning out machine-gun nests on the Siegfried Line. What’s left is out pounding the beat. Gripe less, work more. I don’t want to spend Christmas down here any more than you.”

  A few minutes later was when Burke greeted the invisible Officer O’Shea.

  “I’ll bite,” McReary said finally. “Who is he, and how long’s he been holding his breath under all this crap?”

  Burke stooped, grunted, and tipped something up from the slab floor. McReary looked at the cutout image of a cartoon policeman with a bulbous nose and a crooked Killarney grin, wearing an old-fashioned harness uniform topped by a peaked cap. It was two inches thick, as wi
de as a pair of cops standing shoulder to shoulder, and judging by the sound of the big man’s exertions as heavy as lead. There were two rectangular holes where the eyes belonged.

  “Looks like a lot of scrap iron for a Halloween decoration. What is it?”

  “It’s from before I came on the job. The old-timers were still talking about it then. The department had it run up by the drop-forge team at the Ford plant. It was supposed to give cover when the riot squad charged Bolsheviks and anarchists forted up somewhere back around twenty, but it was only used once, when Baboon Magoon knocked over the Motor City Savings and Loan solo and somebody tripped the alarm. He got off three before they cut him down.” Reaching around the edge, Burke pointed out three deep circular dents where a flesh-and-blood cop’s heart would be. “Boiler plate.”

  McReary stepped over a case of empty Old Log Cabin bottles and behind the big metal slab, which Burke was holding upright by an iron handle riveted to the back, which was blank. He saw then it was mounted on casters.

  “It should’ve been donated,” McReary said. “It’d be a lot more useful as part of a Sherman tank.”

  “Oh, you never know. Imagine going to a Nazi Bund rally in Grand Circus Park and laying eyes on this thing trundling your way pushed by two cops with Tommy guns.” The big detective rolled it forward, then back, the hard rubber wheels squeaking. “A little oil and Officer O’Shea’s ready to report for duty.”

  “Why O’Shea?”

  “First name’s Rick.”

  “Oh. Ha-ha. Wheel it over to that pile we set aside for the scrap drive.”

  “Damn shame. He should be decorated, a wound like that.”

  “What’s the matter, too tuckered?”

  “Take my place, you fresh kid. Feel how it was to be the city’s finest before we wound up rousting Four-F troublemakers out of the beer gardens downtown.”

  McReary took hold of the handle, which was big enough for two hands. When Burke let go, it almost fell on top of the smaller detective. He was lining his eyes up with the holes in the iron head when a gun barked, an explosion in the enclosed quarters, followed by a spang and a blow he felt in his hands on the handle. He craned his neck to see around the effigy. Burke had a sheepish look on his face and his .38 revolver in his hand.