Jitterbug

by Loren D. Estleman

  Carlo’s unblinking stare was his only response. Then he was gone.

  Canal grinned. “Just for a second there you sounded like Father Coughlin.”

  “I got a thing against making appointments with cheap crooks.”

  “So how long you going to let him boil?”

  Zagreb smeared butter on his hunk of bread. “Just till I finish this.”

  “Miss the uniform, I guess.”

  McReary dunked his own bread in his glass of water. “Zag knows he’s safe. There ain’t enough dicks to go around till they hang Hitler.”

  Burke said, “Going back to uniform don’t scare me. I don’t want Carlo spitting in my chowder.”

  When the lieutenant ate the last of his bread, the others pushed back their chairs. “Just Canal,” he said. “I don’t want to give the little greaseball a coronary.”

  “He’d have to have a heart to begin with,” Burke said. But he reached for his bread.

  The room, normally reserved for large parties, contained Frankie Orr, seated in the middle of the long, empty table, and Tino, his bodyguard and sometime driver, pretending to be a piece of furniture in a corner. A tattered green, red, and white flag from some forgotten Italian campaign decorated a mahogany-paneled wall lined with portraits in frames of olive-skinned men in stiff collars with oiled hair and studs in their ties. Tino, a product of a Sicilian coastal village where sailors had docked for six hundred years, was fair-haired and blue-eyed, with roses in his cheeks and a beautiful mouth, curved like a violin. He had a twenty-inch neck and the muscles of his jaws stuck out on either side like barbells. Zagreb knew he carried an army .45 automatic in an underarm holster and that he used it to snuff out candles at outdoor wedding receptions on Belle Isle. His permit to carry a concealed weapon was signed by Governor Kelly; one of several services requested by his employer in return for helping to end a milk drivers’ strike in Port Huron. Two arrests, petty theft and assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder, no convictions. Zagreb liked Tino. He had bought his widowed father a house in Sterling Heights and had been among the first to present himself for recruitment at the Light Guard Armory after Pearl Harbor—catching hell from Frankie, who had pulled a senator out of bed to see that the paperwork was torn up. The bodyguard wore an American flag pin in his lapel and bought war bonds every payday.

  Francis Xavier Oro, a Brooklyn tough imported by the late Sal Borneo to save Oro from street retribution following his acquittal on a charge of garroting a man to death aboard the New York elevated railway—hence the sobriquet the Conductor—had put on weight since Prohibition, but retained the slick good looks of a movie gangster. Streaks of silver highlighted the glossy black waves of his hair, and his teeth—straightened, bleached, and bonded—shone blue-white against his sunlamp tan when he chose to smile, which he seldom did when the police were present. His brows were plucked, his face close-shaven by a barber, and the nails on the fingers he was wiping with a moist warm towel provided by the waiter were pared and buffed, although never polished. The fit alone of his dark suit bespoke its two-hundred-dollar price tag, and a conservative striped necktie lay quietly against his white shirt. He had abandoned flash after the lesson of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, who had gone to prison more for the showiness of their lifestyle than the charges the government had trumped up against them. Rumor had it Frankie had been more than peripherally involved in the killing of radio commentator Jerry Buckley in 1931. Uncorroborated testimony by one witness before a grand jury had accused him of slashing the throat of a disloyal employee in a downtown restaurant the same year.

  Orr put down the towel, picked up a knife, and pried open a mussel on a plate mounded high with them. A boneyard of empty shells lay on a platter at his elbow. “Max Zagreb,” he said without looking up. “What the hell kind of a name’s that?”

  “Yugoslavian. What kind of name’s Orr?”

  “Oro. If I wanted to go by what the newspapers call me I’d of put it on my citizenship papers.”

  “The State Department wants to yank your citizenship, I heard.”

  “The State Department’s got its hands full rounding up Japs to send to Manzanar.”

  “They’ll run out of Japs.” Zagreb put his hands in his pockets. “I hear Mussolini hangs mafiosos six at a time. Right on the dock when they’re deported from America.”

  “Mussolini’s got his hands full, too. You a citizen, Lieutenant?”

  “I was born here.”

  “I would of been if I’d had a say. It’s a great country. You know I came here with forty-eight dollars in my pocket? Now I own two hotels and I’m negotiating for a quarter interest in the Hazel Park track. The streets really are paved with gold.”

  Canal said, “You just have to scrape off the shit to get down to it.”

  Orr looked up at the big sergeant. The Sicilian had heavy lids with blue veins in them. He spoke to Zagreb. “The invitation was for one. Barney Google’s crashing the gate.”

  “This isn’t a friendly call.” Zagreb was looking at Tino, who had come out of his slouch. The bodyguard met his gaze but stayed where he was.

  “I guessed that. That’s why I didn’t offer you a mussel.” The racketeer sucked the meat out of the shell he’d opened, washed it down with red wine from his glass, discarded the shell, and reached for another. “If this is about the strike at the Packard plant, I’m not in that line of work now. It’s unpatriotic in time of war.”

  “We’ll let Roosevelt handle that one,” Zagreb said. “This is about ration stamps.”

  “If you’re short on red points I can make a call.”

  “Somebody’s been killing old people for their stamps. Grabs them from behind and cuts them open and leaves them to bleed to death while he goes through their hoard.”

  “That’s anti-American.”

  Canal swiveled his eyes. “That’s one I didn’t expect from the Conductor.”

  “I meant hoarding. Depletes the stores when they cash them in. Everybody suffers, especially our boys overseas. You ought to make this guy Citizen of the Year.”

  Zagreb said, “We don’t have one of those. I guess we’ll lock him up till he rots instead.”

  “I was kidding, of course. I don’t like amateur crooks. They fuck up the average.”

  “You could help take this one off the street. We’re burning a lot of gasoline on him that should be going to submarines.”

  “I’m all ears.” He held up an open shell as if he were listening through it.

  “He’s got to be laying off those stamps someplace. You own the black market. You’d know if you were buying more from one person than one person ought to have to sell.”

  “I’m an honest businessman who loves his country. I donated a car to the scrap drive, a Lincoln. Repeat what you just said and I’ll take you to court.”

  “We’re all friends here,” Zagreb said. “Right, Tino?”

  Tino said nothing.

  “This is horseshit.” Canal leaned on his big hands on the table. “You own a roadhouse up on Square Lake, B-girls and gambling. I got a friend with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department owes me a favor. It’s a big enough favor to make him forget how much the county prosecutor wins there every month. You got six betting parlors on Gratiot alone, a whorehouse on Cass, and the pinball concession on the West Side. I ain’t swung an axe since Repeal. I need the practice.”

  Orr had to lean over to look at Zagreb. Red spots the size of poker chips had appeared on his cheeks. “There’s a leash law in this town,”

  The lieutenant kept his hands in his pockets. “You forgot numbers.”

  “I didn’t forget numbers,” Canal said. “I was saving them for last. We ain’t had a good bum sweep in five years. Your runners could get swept up for vagrancy, by accident of course. We’ll kick them loose as soon as you vouch for them, but them little paper bags they carry might get lost in Property. No big deal, I guess. How much dough can you carry in one of them little bags?”


  “Who’s this Polack working for, himself or the department?” Orr picked up another mussel.

  “I ain’t a Polack. I’m Ukrainian.”

  “Fucking communist.”

  Canal took his hands off the table. Tino took a step away from the wall. Zagreb patted the big man’s arm. Canal relaxed.

  “The sergeant’s a Republican,” Zagreb said. “Anyway, the commies are our friends now. The common enemy, you know?”

  Orr got open the shell, looked at the meat inside, then laid it on his plate. He tested the point of the knife against the ball of his thumb, then laid the knife down too and reached for the moist towel.

  “I’ll ask some questions around,” he said. “I can’t promise anything.”

  Zagreb said, “That makes two of us.”

  chapter nine

  AFTER LEAVING ROMA’S, MAX Zagreb said good night to the others and went back to his office at 1300 Beaubien. There was no one waiting for him in the two-room apartment on Michigan Avenue, and he didn’t feel like going back and listening to dance music from the Oriole Ballroom. He sublet the apartment from a marine whose last address was in Sydney, Australia, depositing his rent the first of every month in an escrow account at the National Bank of Detroit. On the same day he made his monthly mortgage payment to Detroit Manufacturers Bank to maintain the two-story house he’d moved out of on Rivard last December. His wife’s complaint, he remembered as he shuffled through the photographs of the slashed and bloated corpse that had surfaced in Flatrock Monday, was that he never discussed his work.

  The office had even less of the personal touch than the apartment, but at least it was supposed to be that way. His Academy class picture, just another stamped-out face in an oval among three rows of them, hung crooked between a war map and a bulletin board shingled three-deep with FBI wanted circulars, most of them featuring espionage suspects. A Stroh’s beer case stuffed with files stood atop a scratched green file cabinet—overflow from the drawers—and a black Royal typewriter with a wide document carriage occupied a metal stand next to his yellow oak desk, a scrapyard of arrest forms, stacks of copies of the News, Times, and Free Press turning orange, and unwashed coffee mugs serving double duty as paperweights. There was a coffin-shaped Airline radio with a police scanner and a steel wastebasket bearing a label reading WARNING—VOLATILE MATERIAL that he had inherited from the room’s former occupant, who had appropriated it from the Chrysler tank plant before shipping out to England. Someone had pasted a cutout of Betty Boop to the inside of the frosted-glass door, then tried to remove it with a scrub brush, leaving only the huge eyes and chronic pout. Something about it reminded him of the KILROY WAS HERE cartoon on the sidewalk in front of the house where Anna Levinski was killed. He’d thought about finding a brush and finishing the job, but had decided against it. A little reminder couldn’t hurt.

  Aside from convincing him that the Levinski woman had been Kilroy’s second victim, the details of the Flatrock case were no help. The victim, Ernest Sullivan, was a retired Corktown bartender, reported missing three days before by his daughter, who after the body was discovered insisted she knew nothing about unredeemed ration stamps. Neighbors and merchants in stores where he shopped reported seeing fistfuls of stamps bound with rubber bands whenever he took out his wallet, but added that he seldom used them, paying for non-ration items with cash. No wallet was found on the body, and the local police assumed the motive was robbery. Details of the autopsy were a close match with Dr. Edouard’s in the Yegerov killing and Zagreb’s own observation of the corpse in the Levinski case. All three victims had been sliced open lengthwise like watermelons.

  Zagreb laid the file atop the debris on the desk, thumbed down to the folder marked LEVINSKI, and looked through the contents, setting aside the crime-scene and autopsy photos, which were useless to anyone but a student of geriatric anatomy. Again he fingered the scrap of newsprint he had used to make an impression of the pen scratches on the varnished top of Anna Levinski’s lamp table. The photographer, who had done his best, had succeeded only in confirming what they’d already guessed, despite the many angles he had used in shooting the table and the chemicals he had used to treat the negatives. The script matched samples from grocery lists Mrs. Levinski had written, and the rest of “Hamtramck” and part of the house number proved she had recorded her address on something—shortly before she died, if the fresh ink stains on her hands were any indication. No pen had been found containing ink to match, and no recent documents on which she had written her address. He couldn’t help thinking that the reason she had been writing, and the fact that the killer appeared to have taken the pen and document with him when he left, were central to the solution. He wondered if she was ordering something. Posing as a salesman was one way to get inside a strange door.

  OST

  He said it aloud: “Oh ess tee.”

  The photographer had been unable to coax any more letters out of the other part of what she had written; the pictures had nothing to add to that part of the paper in Zagreb’s hand. He produced another fold of newsprint from his inside breast pocket, his makeshift notebook, spread it out on the corner of the desk, and made a list:

  MOST

  HOST

  GHOST

  POST

  POSTER

  ROSTER

  NOSTRIL

  After that he went blank. None of the words helped. He refolded the sheet and returned it to his pocket. Maybe something better would occur to him when his brain was fresh. He wondered if Walters, the Hamtramck detective who had presided over the initial investigation, had had any luck canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses. He called the Hamtramck PD, but got only a desk sergeant who told him Walters wouldn’t be in until 8:00 A.M. tomorrow. Zagreb’s Wittnauer said it was ten past one. He rang off without saying good-bye.

  He walked back to his apartment. He’d let the others have the car and his own vehicle, a 1939 Plymouth coupe, was in storage. The garage fees were less than he would have spent on gasoline and oil and tires even if he had the ration tickets, and between his rent and the mortgage payments on a house he was no longer living in he had barely enough left to buy cigarettes and groceries. Anyway, he did some of his best thinking when he was walking. Just now he was thinking that for all the good his thinking was doing the City of Detroit he might as well enlist in the navy. No one expected you to use your brain when you were swabbing a deck.

  At Fort he stopped and waited for the light to change, he didn’t know why. There were no cars in sight, not another person on the street. If it weren’t for the lights he saw in several of the buildings, he might have thought a blackout was in effect. He wondered if the end of the war, if it ever ended, would bring back the city’s nightlife, or if people would grow accustomed to early evenings, cheap novels printed on coarse paper, and necessities doled out by a stern bureaucracy. Already the days of neon lights in Cadillac Square and weekend jaunts to Windsor seemed part of a past so remote it might have been something described to him by his grandfather.

  While he was waiting he shook a Chesterfield out of the pack and rattled the remaining contents. Only two more. He couldn’t remember if there had been another unopened pack in the carton that morning or if this were the last. He glanced at the Cunningham’s on the opposite corner, willing it to be open. The CLOSED sign was in the door. There was a light in the display window to discourage burglars, beyond which he could see part of the magazine rack and, tantalizingly, rows of crisp cigarette cartons in front of the pharmacy counter. He sighed and returned the unlit cigarette to the pack. He needed one to put himself to bed, another to wake himself up in the morning, and a third with his coffee.

  He looked again at the drugstore window. The light had changed, but he’d lost interest in it. One of the glossy magazine covers in the rack was partially obscured behind a Revlon lipstick display on an easel in the window. All he could read were the last three letters of the magazine’s name: OST.

  He recognized the typeface and
the distinctive style of the cover illustration. There was no need for a closer look, but he crossed the street and stood in front of the window, leaning close and cupping his hands around his eyes to block the glare from the corner streetlight. From that angle he could see the entire cover. It featured a Norman Rockwell painting of a gang of half-dressed boys running away from a pond with a NO SWIMMING sign prominently displayed. It was the July issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

  chapter ten

  HE SHAVED OFF THE disappointing moustache first thing Sunday morning. Taylor hadn’t worn one in Bataan, and the clean look shouted America, drowning out cries for Hitler’s toothbrush and Tojo’s graying chevron. While his hands were occupied with the razor, Father Coughlin came on WJR and he was forced to suffer through the bombast. He had once listened avidly to the fiery pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, only to tune out when Coughlin broke with FDR and denounced him as anti-God.

  He was a great admirer of Roosevelt. The economy was of no interest to him, and First Lady Eleanor’s efforts to raise the status of American Negroes left him unmoved, but the “Day of Infamy” speech on December 8, 1941, had made him a disciple. He’d seen and heard the speech in a newsreel at the State and gone directly from there to the Armory to sign up. His subsequent rejection had only reinforced his conviction that the president was surrounded with traitors.

  One of these was U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle. It was Biddle who had resisted his chief executive’s order to intern all 600,000 German aliens registered in the United States. Biddle’s move to round up 125,000 Japanese-Americans was hardly conciliatory. The first man, the man he’d seen buying oranges in the Eastern Market with cash from a wallet stuffed with unredeemed ration stamps, had looked a little like Biddle in a picture he’d seen of the attorney general with Roosevelt in Liberty. He’d followed him down to the river, waited for a young couple dressed up for a concert at Ford Auditorium to pass, then moved in from behind, cut him, and tipped him into the water, reaching down to grip the fat wallet, effectively allowing the old man to fall away from his hoard. It was all over in three seconds.