Jitterbug

by Loren D. Estleman

  “My name’s Dwight.”

  The sergeant’s neck swelled. Instinctively Dwight changed his tone.

  “I don’t want no trouble, boss. I just want to axe about my brother. The one in the zoot suit?”

  “Call Mr. Keen.” The sergeant had a mean grin, all bottom teeth with black between them. “Tracer of Lost Persons, you know? Your mammy hear you on the rah-dio.”

  “Which zoot?” asked the man with the forehead. “All you boys dress like circus wagons.”

  “He had him a Hupmobile stick in his pants. Your men done took him.”

  “Concealed weapon, Lieutenant.”

  “My old man had a Hup,” said the lieutenant. “That’s an uncomfortable thing to carry around.”

  Dwight said, “He lives at Sojourner Truth.”

  The lieutenant dropped his cigarette and ground it out. “Got a job, has he?”

  “Willow Run. Me, too. Today’s his wedding anniversary,” he lied.

  “You’ll have to give him his present at the jail.”

  “Can I bail him out?”

  “That’s up to the judge. You’ll have to wait till he’s arraigned.”

  “Can I ask what’s this about?”

  “Curious nigger, ain’t you?” The sergeant was grinning still, but there was danger in it now.

  “We’re looking for ration stamps. Lots of ration stamps. You read the papers?”

  “No, just magazines.”

  “We’re looking for a killer. He kills old people for their ration stamps.”

  “He colored?”

  “Tonight’s the coloreds’ turn. Last night it was the wops. Tomorrow it’ll be the Polacks, or maybe the Belgians. We ought to have this one wrapped up in twenty-three days. That’s how many groups we got in this town. Any more questions?” He thumped the bottom of a pack of Chesterfields and speared one between his lips.

  “Hits ’em over the head, do he?”

  “Guts ’em like a perch, why?”

  “It ain’t Earl. All he gots is that Hupmobile stick.”

  “The law discourages that, too.” The lieutenant thumbed the wheel of a Ronson, tilted his head to bring the end of the cigarette to the flame. That okay with you?” He blew a plume, snapped shut the lighter. When Dwight said nothing he nodded. “Good. On account of we wouldn’t want to do anything that didn’t meet with your approval.”

  Dwight thanked the cream-colored fuck for the information and went to find Elizabeth.

  chapter fourteen

  THE TURNKEY DWIGHT SPOKE to in Visitors, a Wayne County sheriff’s deputy with wire-rimmed glasses and wisps of colorless hair like corn silk combed across his scalp, ran a finger down a list of names on a clipboard suspended by a string from a nail in the wall and told him he didn’t have any Earl Littlejohn in the population.

  “What’s that mean, he ain’t here?”

  “What it means.”

  “Was he here?”

  The turnkey looked at him, opened the top drawer of his gray steel desk, still looking at him, slapped a folder bound in shabby mahogany-colored cloth onto the desk, and snapped it open. He turned a page, moving his lips as he read, then closed the folder and returned it to the drawer and punched it shut. “Somebody came and got him last shift.”

  “What, bailed him out?”

  “Somebody from downtown. I can’t make out the signature.”

  “What’s downtown?”

  The turnkey sighed. “Police headquarters.” When Dwight didn’t react he said, “Thirteen hundred Beaubien. Want me to draw you a map?”

  “I don’t live in town.”

  The man sighed again and gave him directions. Dwight stopped listening after two turns. The damn city was laid out like a wheel downtown, but whoever had designed it had lost interest after a few blocks and changed it to a grid. Police headquarters seemed to stand somewhere in the no-man’s-land between. He went out and asked the first colored person he saw, an old baldy with a white moustache, dressed in overalls and sweeping a concrete stoop belonging to the building next door. The man said, “Hell, boy, you’re standing smack-dab in front of it.”

  Dwight looked up at the city block of granite with arched windows marching the length of the ground floor. The weasel in the jail had wanted to get him lost.

  “Where can I find the Four Horsemen?”

  The old man scratched a clump of white whiskers under his chin. “Well, war’s all around. You don’t gots to go far to find famine, nor pestilence neither, comes to that. I ain’t seen Jesus.”

  Dwight thanked him for the information he could use and walked around to the front of the building, which was all stairs to the entrance. He had on Earl’s old suit and one of his brother’s more conservative ties, gray-and-black rayon with a musical clef printed on it. Even with the belt buckled just under his sternum the pants were too long and he’d had to turn up the cuffs, which Elizabeth had insisted upon ironing so they’d look natural. He’d slept on the old couch in their living room after staying up late saying soothing things when she expressed her fears about Earl in police custody; fears he shared without admitting it. The key to the Model A had gone with Earl, and Dwight had had to call two cab companies before he found a driver who would accept a fare to Sojourner Truth. He’d risen after just two hours’ sleep to catch the bus downtown, only to find his sister-in-law already up and in the kitchen cooking him breakfast. He hoped Earl appreciated her. He couldn’t remember a morning in Eufala that didn’t find their mother still in bed while Dwight and Earl made coffee, often using yesterday’s grounds because she was too sick to visit the market. It had been this way even when their father was still around, his nights out tending to crowd noon of the next day.

  It made Dwight’s cheeks burn to ask again for the Four Horsemen, but the sergeant behind the front counter, who looked like Churchill, didn’t blink. “Fifth floor, Racket Squad.” He jerked a nicotine-stained thumb in the direction of the elevators.

  Dwight vaguely remembered hearing that Detroit Police Headquarters was designed by the same man who had laid out the Willow Run plant, but he couldn’t see much of a family resemblance between that utilitarian barn and the corridor where he stood waiting for an elevator to come get him. The marble floor needed mopping and wax and there were gum wrappers and cigar bands swept up like drift snow against the golden-oak wainscoting, but even the casual squalor of the police couldn’t cloud the Roman Empire authoritarianism of the architect’s vision. He was aware of the dirt under his nails and the fact that his shoes needed polishing. He suspected it was part of the plan that he felt like a flea in a cathedral.

  By the time the brass doors shuttled open he had been joined by two officers in uniform, both over six feet and two hundred pounds. They took up most of the car, the stench of their cheap aftershave lotion was inebriating. He was relieved when they got out on the third floor, without ever having given any indication that they knew they weren’t alone. Dwight felt invisible now, and decided that was an improvement.

  Another marble-and-wainscoted corridor greeted him on five, lined with oaken doors with frosted-glass panels, one of which bore gold letters spelling out RACKET SQUAD. He opened it against the pressure of a pneumatic closer and let it sigh shut behind him. The room beyond wasn’t much larger than an ordinary office, with a portion sacrificed besides for a corner cubicle whose walls fell four feet short of the ceiling. The linoleum floor was none too clean, littered with the inevitable scraps of paper and scarred with orange cigarette burns. The windows were heavily gridded, filmed with tobacco smut, and under the buzzing fluorescents stood too many desks, each with its swivel captain’s chair, uncomfortable-looking ladderback for visitors and suspects, and typewriter table bearing a machine with visible belts and gears, unreplaced since before Armistice Day.

  At one of the machines sat a bald man in shirtsleeves, chattering away impressively with all his fingers. He didn’t look up until the bell rang, at which point Dwight was startled when he recognized the youngest
of the four detectives who had entered the Forest Club the previous night. Without a hat on the man had just a brief fringe of red hair and looked much older. He had freckles on his scalp.

  The man looked at Dwight with no recognition. He picked up a smoldering cigarette from an old burn groove on the edge of his desk, took a drag, replaced it in its groove, and sat back. The fan on his desk, battered stainless steel with a cast-iron base, gnawed at the smoke, but hadn’t the power to shred it, much less stir the stagnant air in the room. “Help you?”

  “I’m looking for the lieutenant.”

  A bald head tilted toward the cubicle. “That’s his office.”

  Dwight went over there. The gold lettering on the frosted glass read LT. M. ZAGREB. He raised his fist to knock.

  “He’s out now,” said the man at the desk.

  Man let him walk all that way.

  “Know when he’ll be back, boss?”

  “Later.”

  “Can I wait?”

  “Free country.”

  Dwight sat on a ladderback chair next to a desk with a name-plate that read SGT. S. CANAL. The swivel stood in front of the square plaster post that held up the ceiling. There was a hair-oil stain on the institutional green paint where the back of the sergeant’s head came into contact with it when he leaned back in his chair. Above the stain, yellowed Scotch tape held a sheet of ruled notepaper with a penciled legend printed in round upper-and lowercase letters, as by a child:

  There is more law at the end of a nightstick than in all the courts in the land.

  Feeling more out of place than he had since coming to Michigan, Dwight folded his hands in his lap and concentrated on making himself invisible. A long minute crawled past before the typing resumed. After a while the monotonous rhythm became its own soothing kind of silence, against which he heard the sounds of other life in the building coming up the ventilation ducts and through the open transom over the door. Telephones rang, Lowell Thomas’s voice recited a long list of unpronounceable Russian place names on a radio snarling with static. An overloaded metal file drawer boomed shut—office artillery. Dwight looked up at the big electric clock, calculating how long he could wait for an interview that might take ten minutes. When he’d called in to the plant pleading family emergency he’d promised to try to make it in by eleven. He had fifty minutes if the buses were running on schedule.

  After twenty minutes a man came in whom Dwight remembered from the Forest Club. The second biggest of the four men in plainclothes, he was the best dressed and the oldest-looking—forty anyway, with a tired posture that suggested his custom shirt was the only thing holding him up.

  The hair on the backs of his hands was as coarse as wire. He spotted Dwight right away, but didn’t look his way again even when it was clear he was discussing the presence of a stranger with the young bald man at the desk. They spoke in low murmurs, lost under the high ceiling and the purring of the inadequate fan. Two or three minutes of that, and then the newcomer sat down at a desk by the windows and picked up a telephone and started dialing. His conversation this time was louder, he had a bad connection. He asked who was running at the fairgrounds, listened, then placed twenty dollars on Betty Blitz’s nose. After that he made another call, less comprehensible from his end of the conversation. The other man continued typing, scraps of life elsewhere in the building drifted into the room, and Dwight wallowed in the conviction that he didn’t matter.

  He had, he reasoned, ten minutes’ grace, and was planning his exit and his route to the nearest bus stop when the hall door opened and the man he now knew as Lieutenant Zagreb entered, accompanied by the big goggle-eyed plainclothesman who from the process of elimination Dwight identified as Sergeant Canal. The lieutenant looked small in his companion’s presence, compact in the same black suit he’d had on the night before and gray winter fedora. He was in fact six inches taller than Dwight; his large head, like a brainy scientist’s in a movie with a Nazi kidnap plot, contributed to the illusion. He paused before the bald man’s desk and spoke with him quietly for thirty seconds. Dwight had risen at his entrance, and a glance in his direction from the bald man told him he was being talked about once again, but Zagreb never gave him a glance, and after a moment walked straight to his cubicle and unlocked the door and went in and closed it behind him.

  Sergeant Canal hung his hat on the hall tree, by the door to the corridor and came over and sat down behind his desk. He looked it over as if to determine that none of the objects on top had been moved, slid open the belly drawer and looked at its contents. He shut it and swiveled his eyes toward Dwight.

  “You can go in.”

  The inside of the cubicle smelled of dry dust and pulp paper, musty like old magazines. Zagreb was sitting behind a wooden desk heaped with papers and curled file folders, his face illuminated eerily from below in the reflected light of a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade. The shade had a crack, and Dwight stepped to one side to take the jagged blade of white light out of his eye. Lighted that way and with his hat off, the lieutenant’s head above the eyebrows looked as big as a world globe.

  “Your name’s Dwight?”

  It took Dwight a second to nod. He’d had no indication he’d been recognized from last night.

  “You don’t look much like your brother.”

  “I thought we all looked alike.” He tried to smile.

  No reaction. “You’re new to Detroit.”

  It was a statement, but Dwight answered it as if it were a question. “Yes, boss. We come up from Alabama in January.”

  “How do you like our winter?”

  “I expected it be cold. Didn’t know summer’d be so hot, though.”

  “You’ve been to the jail, I guess.”

  “They said somebody done took Earl away.”

  “He’s in an interrogation room downstairs. We wanted to ask him some questions.”

  Dwight said nothing. After a little silence Zagreb switched off the desk lamp and sat back. His suit coat slid open, exposing the cherry handle of the revolver in his underarm holster. “Take a seat.”

  The only other chair was stacked with newspapers. Dwight lifted the stack, looked around for a horizontal surface, and transferred it to the floor. It was a wooden chair with arms, not as uncomfortable as the one in the squad room.

  “Where do you live, Dwight? You don’t mind if I call you Dwight.”

  The lieutenant’s tone hadn’t changed. It wasn’t unfriendly, but it wasn’t as friendly as the words. Dwight said it didn’t make any difference to him. “Ypsi,” he said. “I got me a room.”

  “You learn fast. There are hillbillies living there a year who still say Yip-see. You smoke, Dwight?” He plucked a fresh-looking pack of Chesterfields out of his shirt pocket.

  “No, sir, I never got the habit.”

  “Too bad. I read in Reader’s Digest it’s good for your system. Kills germs.” He stuck one between his lips and snicked open his lighter. It wouldn’t fire. He found a match and used an old scar on the edge of the desk to scratch it. “Fucking Ronson. Lost my Zippo. You read Reader’s Digest, Dwight?”

  He wanted to say this was bullshit. “Just the jokes.”

  “You read magazines, though. Saturday Evening Post?”

  “Sometimes. When can I take Earl home?”

  “That depends on your brother, Dwight. Right now he’s refusing to answer our questions.”

  “What questions? All he done was get himself caught carrying around a old Hupmobile stick.”

  “We’re holding him for treason.”

  Dwight’s blood went to his feet. He couldn’t say the word and didn’t think he ever had. It shamed him that his first thought was, Jesus God, what’s Earl gone and got himself into now?

  He was aware Zagreb was studying him closely. He didn’t bother trying to put on any sort of face. He didn’t know which one the lieutenant was looking for.

  “We haven’t charged him yet. That’ll bring in the FBI, and we’re not ready to g
ive him up. We opened his locker at Willow Run. Plant security’s cooperative, we didn’t have to get a warrant. We’ve applied for one to search his house. If we find there what we found in his locker, we’ll have no choice but to notify the feds.”

  Dwight felt drained. The son of a bitch was making him ask. “What’d you find?”

  “Ration stamps.”

  “Everybody gots ration stamps.”

  “Everybody doesn’t have a shoebox stuffed full of them.”

  “Hoarding ain’t against the law.”

  Zagreb stabbed out the cigarette in a dirty bronze ashtray. It was only half-smoked. His face looked tired and pale under the great brow.

  “Rationing only went into effect this year,” he said. “That’s not long enough for one man to have hoarded as many as we found in that box. He stole them, Dwight, and he’s selling them on the black market. Treason in time of war’s a hanging offense, Dwight. No appeal.”

  chapter fifteen

  I NEED TO ASK a favor,” Dwight said.

  “Ask, Dwight,” Zagreb said.

  “Stop calling me Dwight.”

  Zagreb blinked. “You said it didn’t make any difference.”

  “You weren’t talking about hanging my brother then.”

  “You prefer ‘Mr. Littlejohn’?”

  “I wouldn’t answer to it. Nobody ever called me that. I just need to ask you to stop saying Dwight every time you open your mouth. What I mean is, there’s only two of us here. I think I can figure out who you’re talking to.”

  “That sounds just a little bit uppity, Dwight.”

  “I guess that’s Mr. Ford’s fault. We all the same on the line.”

  The lieutenant might have smiled then, or he might not have, and it might or might not have meant amusement. You never could tell with white men.

  “Okay, Dwight. I mean okay.”

  Dwight relaxed a little. He didn’t know if he’d scored a point or lost one. He was a little surprised to find out he didn’t care. He didn’t care about catching the bus either. “Now what’s this shit about treason?”