Levinski didn’t look up. He breathed noisily, snuffling up snot and exhaling through his mouth. The lieutenant stood in front of him with his hands in his pockets. “He found her?”
Brandon nodded. He was the only one who had gone in with Zagreb. There wasn’t room for another occupant. “Walters says the sergeant who took the call spent five minutes getting him calm enough to give the address. Half of it was in Polish. Which in this town is no big problem.”
Zagreb went to the chest of drawers. The top drawer hung open. “Print boys been in?”
“On the way. Everything takes longer now.”
He peeled back a stack of sleeveless undershirts and looked at an R.G. Dunn box in the corner of the drawer. He was still holding the pencil Walters had given him. He used the eraser end to tip up the pasteboard lid. Inside was a pile of wrinkled bills and a scattering of change. “This where they kept the ration books?”
“According to Levinski.”
The lieutenant looked again at the man on the bed, inventorying him along with the rest of the room. “Any domestic calls, complaints?”
“Walters says no.”
“I won’t get anything out of him the locals haven’t.”
Brandon sucked hard on the onyx holder, coaxing all the good out of his cigarette. A recent memo from Commissioner Witherspoon had urged all upper-level department brass to cut down on smoking by way of setting an example, freeing up cartons for America’s fighting men. Zagreb hadn’t seen a butt longer than a quarter of an inch in an ashtray downtown since before the memo.
“There’s a reader on my desk from the cops in Flatrock,” the inspector said. “They pulled a fifty-eight-year-old man out of the river three days ago, cut up just like the Levinski woman. Local character, carried a fat wallet stuffed tight with stamps and no one ever saw him spend one. The wallet wasn’t on the corpse.”
Zagreb felt his face getting haggard. “Shit. One of those.”
“I’ll send over the paperwork.”
“How come you’re so good to me?”
“Save it for show-up, Lieutenant. I got no shortage of homicides. There’s no need to ration those. Most of my best men are in England. It isn’t as if we aren’t all in the same boat.”
Zagreb lit up a Chesterfield by way of reply. The memo didn’t cover lieutenants.
Back in the living room, Walters was looking out the window into the window of the house next door. Except for the corpse at his feet there wasn’t a compelling difference between the room he was standing in and the one he was staring at. He turned around when Zagreb asked him about the neighbors.
“I’ve got uniforms out knocking on doors. Don’t get your hopes up. All the housewives are catching rivets over at Rouge.”
Zagreb gave him a card. “Ring me up if you turn anything.”
“I sure will. The Four Horsemen.” He was looking at the card as if that was what was printed there.
Out on the sidewalk, Zagreb told the others about Flatrock.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Canal said. “One of those.”
“That’s what I said.”
Burke, standing at the end of the walk, motioned to the rest of the squad. They joined him just as the coroner’s wagon, a green Chrysler panel truck, pulled into the driveway. Burke pointed at a smeary chalk drawing on the yellowed concrete between his wing tips: a crude cartoon showing a pair of goggle eyes and a long nose and two sets of sausage-shaped fingers overlapping a horizontal line, like someone peering over the edge of a fence. Underneath someone had printed KILROY WAS HERE.
“Anything?” Burke asked.
“What if it is? They’re all over town.” The lieutenant dropped his cigarette and crushed it out on Kilroy’s face.
And now the killer had a name.
chapter four
SID YEGEROV HAD OWNED and operated Empire Cleaners on Twelfth Street for thirty-seven years. Before that he had apprenticed to his Uncle Yuri for six. Yuri, one-eyed and bent over—family legend said the eye had been put out by Cossacks and his spine damaged when imperial cavalry trampled him during a Marxist demonstration in St. Petersburg—was Sid’s godfather. He had traveled by train to meet his nephew in Battery Park after the doctors at Ellis Island had pronounced the young man fit enough to set foot on U.S. shores. Sid remembered the occasion as the first and last time Yuri had addressed him by name. After that the old man had developed an elaborate vocabulary of grunts whose tone and timbre indicated whether his apprentice was in disfavor or merely that his assistance was needed at the counter.
In 1906 the old man died, leaving the business to Sid, then twenty-three. The new owner knocked a hole in the front wall, installed a plate-glass window to let light into what had been a gloomy cave stinking of mildew and candle wax, replaced the Hebrew sign with the stores name lettered in English on the glass, and bought a new steam presser, retiring the one that had been in use since 1889. At that time he also acquired a wife, Chanah, whose photographic portrait, smoky at the edges and tinted with oils according to the custom of the age, still stood on his bedside table at home with black lace around the frame, although she had been dead eighteen years. She had been standing near the window, examining a customers cotton blouse by natural light to determine whether it had been damaged by bleach, when the glass exploded. The police determined that the bomb had been made by filling a smudge pot stolen from a street construction project with paraffin and inserting a flaming rag. The entire front of the store was gutted by fire and Chanah was hospitalized with third-degree burns over eighty percent of her body. She died that night—fortunately, they said, without regaining consciousness.
That was the beginning of the Cleaners and Dyers War, from which the Purple Gang took its name. Sid Yegerov, who paid no attention to territorial disputes and did not keep company with others of his profession, had known nothing of the business until he returned from the bank to find black smoke pouring out of the front of the shop and a hook and ladder clanging up the block.
Sid wasn’t impressed with the police investigation, even when it produced an arrest at the end of just three days. The suspect, a nineteen-year-old neighborhood youth whom the dry cleaner knew by sight, had turned himself in at the local precinct house and confessed, saying he had intended only to destroy the shop as an example to those establishments whose owners refused to align themselves with the Cleaners and Dyers Protective Association, of which he was the local representative. Guilt over the death of Mrs. Yegerov had proven too much for him to bear in silence. Hearst’s Detroit Times ran a picture of the suspect on its police page, face buried in his manacled hands on a bench outside Recorders Court before his arraignment on a charge of felony murder.
The widower was unmoved, It was clear the youth had been put up to take the blame, probably in place of some more valuable gang member, and that he had been promised good representation and a sum of money to compensate him for the inconvenience—in this case, seven to ten years of his life for the lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter, to which he pleaded guilty. He was out in three.
Sid didn’t bother to attend the sentencing, or to keep track of what happened to the boy, although he heard a rumor that something had happened during his confinement in the Southern Michigan Penitentiary at Jackson and that it was bad enough to prevent him from returning to the neighborhood, where the story was known. That meant he was in Toledo. The Purple Gang owned that port on Lake Erie down to the manhole covers and the storage buildings where the Department of Public Works kept the piles of salt it spread on the streets in February, as well as several hundred cases of Old Log Cabin, sourmash whiskey, a favorite in Capone’s Chicago. By now he was probably a street commissioner.
What Sid did, instead of interest himself in the fortunes of the young man who the law was satisfied had taken Chanah’s life, was buy a gun.
It was a seven-millimeter Luger that Krekor Messarian, the Armenian tailor in the next block, had acquired from a German in the trenches in France during the 1917 Chris
tmas truce. The trade had cost him six cartons of Fatimas. The cleaner gave him fifteen dollars. The pistol, an ugly brown length of pipe with checked wooden grips and a firing mechanism that worked on the same basic principle as a cigarette lighter, shared a White Owl cigar box on a shelf below the counter with an extra magazine loaded with brass cartridges. At night he took it home, box and all, and carried it under his arm to work each morning. Everyone in the neighborhood knew about the pistol in Mr. Yegerov’s White Owl box. Boys who came to pick up their parents’ cleaning sometimes worked up courage enough to ask to see it. He always refused. He knew the gun would save his life one day.
When the little copper bell mounted on a spring clip above the door jangled and a young man came in with an army tunic folded over one arm, Sid didn’t examine him any more closely than he did any other customer, although he didn’t get much business from strangers. The uniform didn’t surprise him. He saw them often on streetcars, and had wondered if the young men who wore them used civilian cleaners or whether the service was provided by Uncle Sam. The tunic itself, closely woven wool dyed a rich brown, promised a welcome change from Herman Schwemmer’s out-of-date mustard suit he wore to synagogue and invariably befouled afterward, in summer with dripping ice-cream cones at Sealtest and in fall and winter with matzoh at Berman’s, and Mrs. Tolwasser’s cotton print dress, which attracted mud and grease like lint every time she stepped off the running board of the Edison electric she had been driving ever since Mr. Tolwasser had his brains kicked out by his milk horse on Woodward in 1913. Sid knew every detail of every item of nonwashable apparel in the neighborhood as well as he knew his own.
The young man himself was pleasant-looking in that bland, characterless way of unworn youth—dark sandy hair brushed back from a prominent widow’s peak and features well enough balanced for Hollywood, or so Sid concluded from the pictures he saw in Parade. (He himself hadn’t been to see a movie since Chanah, had never watched one whose dialogue wasn’t restricted to preprinted cards.) The fellow had on a military-style trenchcoat too heavy for a warm June day over a khaki shirt and trousers with a necktie to match. He was carrying a briefcase.
He brushed aside Sid’s greeting with a question. “How are you with ink?”
The cleaner turned his attention from the eyes beneath the liquid black visor of the young man’s cap—clear, brown eyes, anxious about his uniform—to the tunic, which he took and turned inside out without asking questions. The blue-black stain was where he expected to find it, at the base of the inside breast pocket.
“I never carry a fountain pen myself,” he said. “The only thing you can count on them to do is leak.”
“Can you get it out?”
“Is it fresh?”
“It happened yesterday.”
“I can do something if it hasn’t set.” He hung the coat on the rack by the register and slid over the receipt pad. “Name?”
“Taylor.”
He wrote it down, tore off the original, and held it out. “I can have it for you tomorrow night.”
“I need it sooner.”
“Lots of people ahead of you. Nice weather. Barbecues. They pour on plenty of sauce so they don’t notice there’s not much meat.”
Corporal Taylor laid a five-dollar bill on the counter.
Sid couldn’t believe this war. Only five years ago, five dollars was a hundred. He smiled at the eager young soldier. “Inspection?”
The corporal grinned shyly. He was just a boy. “Yes, sir. The captain’s a good man, but he seems to think the war will be won by the side with the sharpest creases.”
Sid grunted. “You can pick the coat up at eight A.M. The chemicals will need to dry tonight or they’ll run and bleach the lining. It will be a dollar twenty.” He pushed the bill back across the counter.
The corporal thanked him and put the money in a trenchcoat pocket.
“Where are you stationed?”
“Fort Wayne.”
“What outfit?” Sid took the tunic off the rack and folded it.
“Hundred and Seventy-seventh.”
“Really? My nephew’s in the Air Corps. This looks like their insignia.”
“That’s right.”
“I thought the Hundred and Seventy-seventh was Field Artillery.”
Corporal Taylor hesitated. The cleaner felt embarrassed for him. “I guess you can’t expect the army to tell us what it’s up to. All we’re doing is paying for this war.”
“I just go where I’m assigned.”
No more words passed between them. The young man left the shop.
Sid was troubled by the exchange, and returned to it from time to time throughout the day, not thinking about it only when he was forced to respond to a customers comments on the war, Roosevelt, rationing, and the mysterious ability of chocolate and cream sauce to migrate to one’s lapels unobserved, or when he made change, which after thirty-seven years still required all his concentration. Particularly when he was daubing at the indigo stain on the rayon lining of Corporal Taylor’s tunic with a sponge dipped in a mixture of mineral spirits and naphtha—his own blend—he wondered about the bizarre lapse. There was no Army Air Corps installation near Detroit. Both the 182nd and the 177th Field Artillery regiments had shipped out months ago, leaving only the Quartermaster Corps at Fort Wayne to receive and store military vehicles produced at the automobile plants. Perhaps the young man had served overseas and been wounded, either physically or mentally, and was confused about details. Certainly there was an air about him that suggested something vital was missing.
Rotten war. They were all rotten. It didn’t matter if they were endorsed by governments or cheap punk crooks. They were thieves of life and youth. They left ugly stains that all the mineral spirits and naphtha in the world could not eradicate.
He left the tunic to hang overnight, inside out to dry completely and dispel the fumes, locked up, and struck off to board the streetcar home, carrying the White Owl cigar box with the Luger inside. He had become another of those old Jewish shopkeepers plodding along the sidewalk with their shapeless hats pulled low and all their ambitions reduced to the next square of concrete. Lately he had ceased even to think about that, had begun to become what he had beheld. His kind blended into the gray city background like lichens on a stump.
He would never get used to the quietness of the street at that early hour of the evening. The day shift at the plants had let out an hour and a half ago, the night shift was well along. Gas and tire rationing had erased the weekday shopping and entertainment traffic from his neighborhood as effectively as alcohol erased tomato sauce from cotton. If he closed his ears to the bleating of the odd horn over on Woodward, the hollow whistles of the trains shuttling iron pellets and coils of copper wire and donated scrap back and forth across the grounds of the sprawling Rouge plant, he could imagine he was back in St. Petersburg, delivering bread and paper collars to customers of the shops in the narrow twisted streets that had known nothing but horses, carts, and sore feet since before Tamerlane. There, as here, the sudden scrape of a strange heel on pavement echoed off the brick walls as if it were immediately behind him, making the hair on the back of his neck prickle. His fingers tightened on the cigar box. It calmed him with its tactile reality, the reassuring weight of the German automatic resting inside.
He heard the steps for a long time, not increasing in pace but faster than his so that they must overtake him unless he ran, and this he would not do, not at his age and station in life, not while he had a weapon. He assumed they belonged to someone who, like him, was on his way home from work. The man was in a hurry. A young man, then, with a wife awaiting him whom he loved. Probably his route was long and he was walking to save fuel and rubber and wear and tear on his automobile. Sid, who was not so pressed—why hasten home to empty rooms?—slowed his own pace and moved in close to the wall to give the fellow room to pass.
When the footsteps behind him slowed as well, he turned to look over his shoulder. He felt relief when he
saw the man was in uniform. It was only a G.I. hurrying to catch the streetcar and be back in barracks before taps. Then he recognized Corporal Taylor, and for some reason he felt a twinge of apprehension. He stopped and turned to confront it—and him.
“Your uniform will be ready in the morning,” he said. “It must dry overnight, and then I need to press it. There is no use your hurrying what takes time to correct.”
The young soldier had stopped in front of him. His briefcase was open and he had one hand under the flap. When it came out, something came out with it, a long strip of reflected light from the streetlamp on the corner. And then the briefcase was falling and the other arm was curling up and around to encircle Sid’s neck.
He fumbled at the lid of the cigar box, but it slipped from his grip. The box struck the sidewalk, tipping open and dumping out the Luger and the extra magazine. By then he was being spun on his heel, spun and pulled back against the long hard length of the young man’s body. Something tugged at the front of his waistcoat; something that encountered no resistance from the wool or the cotton shirt beneath or the undershirt beneath that and pulled a string of fire from his pelvis to his collarbone. A warm wetness spilled down his leg like urine. Then something broke, a string inside him, and he felt himself folding to the sidewalk like a coat sliding off a hanger in his shop. He never felt the sidewalk.
chapter five
CANAL SAID, “WHICH ONE tonight?”
“I don’t know,” Zagreb said. “You pick.”
“I picked last time.”
“So you’re in practice.”
McReary said, “I’ll pick.”
Canal laughed. “Forget it. You’ll pick the Ladybug because you got a hard-on for that tall barmaid.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Jitterbug Page 3
