The two plainclothes detectives who entered the room first made a mockery of the hike to the desk, loping across it in three seconds and taking up a position at an angle to the window that forced Frankie to swivel a quarter turn to face them. This put the bright sunlight as much into his eyes as theirs. He got up, drew the cord that closed the drapes, and remained standing with his hands resting on the back of the chair. The visitors were two of the largest men Patsy had ever seen. He was especially unnerved by the one whose eyes stood out from his head like rubber door bumpers, and by his nervous energy; even when he was standing still, his hands continued to open and close at his sides and his entire body seemed to vibrate, like a big engine threatening to shake itself apart if it weren’t put to work soon. His companion, older, quieter, with thick mats of black hair on the backs of his hands, represented something altogether more solid and rooted. When he stopped moving it was as if he’d been bolted to the spot for years.
A minute went past before the boy took notice of the third man who had entered quietly behind them. Attired like the others in a black suit and gray fedora, he was slighter and looked much younger, with reddish hair and freckles. He smiled at Patsy, produced a deck of cards from an inside pocket, and throughout the interview executed sleight-of-hand tricks, it seemed as much to amuse himself as Patsy.
“Where’s that Polack lieutenant of yours?” Frankie asked. “I thought all you boys went around on the same leash.”
“He’s too busy to mess around with cheap punks.” This from the nervous man with the scary eyes. “And he ain’t a Polack.”
That seemed to tell Frankie something. The tension went out of him and he circled around in front of his chair and sat down. “This a separate deal, or you figure to split it with the brass?”
The detective who had just spoken rotated his eyes toward his companion and unsheathed a set of teeth with an unhealthy gray sheen. Then he picked up the gooseneck lamp from the desk and slammed it alongside Frankies head backhand.
Astonished, Patsy belched. His stomach “was still tied up from the warehouse and he clapped a palm over his mouth to keep from vomiting. The young detective winked at him. He was still smiling. He cut the deck of cards, transferring the bottom half to the top one-handed.
Frankie, more enraged than injured, started to get up. The older of the two big men leaned across the desk, placed his palm against Frankie’s face with a curious gentle movement, and pushed him back down.
“You asked about Zagreb,” the man said. “He’s changing your bed. He knows how much you like clean sheets. Not like in that shithole in Brooklyn before you sucked your first capo dick.”
“My lawyers will be waiting downtown. I’ll catch a ride back with them. Does FDR know how you boys waste gas? ‘Is this trip necessary?’” Frankie was getting himself back. Patsy felt kind of proud.
“Downtown?” The man with the eyes hoisted his brows comically in his companion’s direction. “Can I tell him?”
“Be my guest.”
The unhealthy gray teeth showed. “This ain’t a bust, punk. We’re taking you to Niggertown. Ever heard of the California?”
Frankie’s smile eroded, and something happened that Patsy had never seen. The pigment paled beneath the natural olive tone of his face, the even finish of his heat lamp-enhanced tan. He jacked the smile back up into place. “Bullshit,” he said.
“He’s heard about the California,” the solid man said to the man with the eyes.
“I ain’t some hop-joint snag you can scare with a yarn like that. You boys already bought yourselves a blue-bag beat on Belle Isle. You want to try for 1-A and a free ticket to some pesthole island in the Pacific?”
The solid man shrugged. The movement was like rocks sliding off a mountain. “You’re not listening, Frank. All this shit is going to happen anyway if we don’t nail Kilroy. That won’t make no difference to you. By then you’ll be crow meat, just like that girl the sheriffs scraped out of the woods out by Willow Run.”
“I told Zagreb I don’t know nothing about Kilroy.”
“He knows that. He also knows you’re the only shop in Detroit without a manpower shortage. It ain’t patriotic keeping it all to yourself. We’re all of us in the same boat, you know?”
Frankie craned his neck to make eye contact with the man doing card tricks. “What’s your story?”
“Me?” The young man shuffled, pasteboards flying between his hands in a blur. “I’m Switzerland.”
“What do you say, Frankie?” asked the solid one. “Churchill and Stalin ain’t friends, but they got Schicklgruber’s nuts in the wringer just the same.”
The man with the eyes hadn’t spoken in several minutes. He stood twisting the lamp’s gooseneck into tortured shapes.
Frankie smoothed back his hair with both palms, adjusted the glistening knot of his tie, and sat back. For a Fascinated Patsy, it was like watching a resurrection. “I got ears.”
chapter twenty-two
DWIGHT LITTLEJOHN WAS BEING devoured by tigers.
Despite the terror and pain he was lucid. It surprised him that they should start with the feet and work their way up. He’d read somewhere, probably in the National Geographic, that big cats went first for the hindquarters, sometimes the entrails; and common sense said the tenderest parts should top the menu. Over thinking things had always been his worst fault; he supposed he’d still be wondering about it when they got to his heart and stopped the flow of blood to his brain.
When the banging started, he thought someone was shooting the tigers. He was mildly sad that whoever it was had come too late. When he realized someone was knocking on his door, he opened his eyes, looked down at the sheet covering him to make sure it wasn’t drenched in his own blood, then got up and into his Hudson’s Basement robe and slippers. His landlady was telling him he had a telephone call. He followed her downstairs, thinking, shit, tigers. Now he was Little Black Sambo.
It was an old-fashioned wall job in the kitchen with a crank and a separate earpiece. The old woman sat down at the table where her husband was eating breakfast, but the couple remained silent, plainly eavesdropping. Dwight turned his back to them and leaned close to the mouthpiece, sticking a finger in his free ear to block out the racket from the old General Electric refrigerator. There wasn’t any way that compressor was going to make it through the war.
“Dwight, it’s Elizabeth. Earl didn’t come home last night.”
“Elizabeth?” His brain was still warming up.
“He’s stayed out late before, but never all night. He wasn’t with you, was he?” There was hope in her voice.
“I ain’t seen him in days, except at the plant. When’d he leave?”
“About seven. He came home and changed clothes and went out. He wouldn’t tell me where he was going.”
“What clothes did he put on?”
“His zoot suit.”
“Did you call the Forest Club?”
“Nobody answered. Dwight, I’m scared.”
He looked at the electric clock gurgling on the wall above the pump-up gas stove—7:30. It was his day off. He’d planned to spend it working on his car. “They don’t open for an hour and a half. Stay by the phone. I’ll start looking.”
“Where could he be?”
“I don’t know. But he went there from the Forest.”
He caught Beatrice Blackwood unlocking the front door. A tall woman built on the Jamaican scale, all legs and long waist, she wore a long summer cotton print dress that outlined her figure to sharp advantage when the sun was behind her and had her hair tied up in a white scarf like a turban. She reminded him of Solomon’s Shulamite.
When he hailed her, trotting across the sidewalk, she spun on her platform soles to face him, a razor in her right hand. Recognizing him, she relaxed, palmed the blade back into the handle, and deposited it between her breasts, surely the most desirable sheath in Detroit. “Morning, Dwight. You turning into a morning barfly?” She opened the door.
&nb
sp; He grasped the edge and held it for her. “I’m looking for my brother. He here last night?”
“Hell, I don’t know. All the nights here run together.” She flipped on the lights, went behind the bar, and tied on an apron. “I’ll have coffee going in a minute.”
“He’s missing, Beatrice. No one’s seen him since last night.”
“Is that a long time?”
“It is for him. He’s a fuck-up, but he’s always come home to his wife.”
“Oh, his wife.” “This ain’t one of them phone calls where you say he ain’t here. He’s in trouble with the cops and maybe the FBI. He’s messing around with the black market.”
She put as much care into making coffee as she did her mixed drinks, measuring with a tin scoop, cracking an egg from the refrigerator into a small china bowl, and tossing the bits of shell into the percolator basket. “He was in last night. I don’t know what time. Early. I didn’t see when he left. The place was pretty full.” “Was he with anybody?”
“He came in alone.”
“What about later?”
She put the bowl with the egg in it into the refrigerator, plugged in the hot plate, and set the pot on top of it. “I was busy, Dwight. I told you the place was full. I couldn’t watch your brother the whole time even if I wanted to.”
“Why lie to me, Beatrice?”
She glared at him. The expression on his face changed her mind. She took a cigarette from a box under the bar, lit it off a Camel giveaway lighter, and leaned a hip against the bar. He had never seen her smoke before without the jade holder.
“I’m in this country on a thread,” she said. “If everything that goes on in this saloon got back to Immigration, I’d have to quit. After that it’s just some time before they arrest me and put me on the next boat. I don’t want to be a whore no more, Dwight. Especially I don’t want to be a whore in Kingston.”
“Do I look like I got connections in Washington? I just want to find Earl.”
“For who? You or his wife?”
He hesitated. “That’s a dumb question. He’s my brother.”
“My brother got me into the house in Kingston.” She blew smoke, shook her head, and put out the cigarette in a brass tray shaped like a horseshoe. “People think bartenders don’t see nothing except glasses that need filling. I’ve seen you with Elizabeth. Comes a point when three people either have to sit down and talk or one of them has to turn around and walk.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He wondered if she’d come to work drunk.
“Forget I said anything. I closed the place at curfew. I’m still asleep. Gidgy was in last night,” she added.
“Gidgy?”
“Gidgy, remember?” She pointed at the man covering his face in the twelve-year-old newspaper clipping on the wall. “He’s the Conductor’s leg man in Paradise Valley. I didn’t see him and Earl together, but Gidgy left early too. Maybe they know each other.”
“Where’s he hang out, besides here?”
“He runs a record store on Erskine.” She gave him the address. “Don’t tell him I told you.”
He walked past the place twice before he spotted the lettering on the second-story window. It was a walk-up above a narrow lunch counter with three stools and an electric griddle, in the door of which leaned a chef built along the lines of Marcus Garvey in a ribbed undershirt, white ducks, and apron, all indescribably filthy. Dwight found the smell of hot grease nauseating at that hour. The stairs were grubby and creaking, the hallway at the top too narrow for two people to pass. He suspected it had been a long time since two people had had to. A door at the end stood partially open with the legend ABYSSINIA RECORDS AND SHEET MUSIC painted on the yellow honeycomb glass.
The aisle between the oaken bins was even more cramped than the hallway, forcing Dwight to walk sideways to reach the end of the rectangular room. Seventy-eight rpm records in brown paper sleeves stood on edge in the bins, each of which was labeled neatly by hand on three-by-five cards Scotch-taped to the fronts, identifying artists and labels. Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong were much in evidence, but for every famous name there were several that were unfamiliar: Scrapper Blackwell, Zue Robertson, the Red Onion Jazz Babies. A wind-up phonograph located somewhere in the no-man’s-land behind the distant counter was playing Bessie Smith, a version of “Lost Your Head Blues” rendered slightly drunken by a worn-out mainspring. A pile of piano rolls occupied one bin, looking like papyrus scrolls, and a hand-lettered sign informed serious collectors that a selection of rare wax cylinders was available for demonstration upon request. Dwight, whose own tastes ran toward Ellington, Basie, and other mainstream colored-orchestras, considered himself in foreign territory. He felt white.
MUSSOLINI INVADES ABYSSINIA bawled the headline on a yellowed copy of the Toledo Blade thumbtacked to the plaster wall above the bins.
The tableau behind the wooden counter was a surprise. Framed photographs of varying shapes and sizes filled every inch of wall space, containing likenesses of Walter “Hot Lips” Page, Lena Home, the Duke and the Count, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Satchmo, Bessie, and some of the white boys, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James (with Betty Grable on his arm), Benny Goodman, Jimmy “The Schnozz” Durante; smiling broadly (and, Dwight thought in some, drunkenly or worse), unguarded and candid. Bing Crosby, casually attired in a baggy checked sport coat and unmatching dark slacks, laughed at the spectacle of his famous porkpie hat perched on Ella Fitzgerald’s elegantly coiffed head. All of the pictures appeared to have been taken in that little cluttered store. Most were autographed. Every bandleader and musician of note seemed to be represented, with exceptions equally impressive by their absence: Wayne King the Waltz King, Fred the Bore Waring of the Pennsylvanians, hammy Sammy Kaye, corny Kay Kyser, Guy Lombardo and his simpering Royal Canadians, the groanworthy Spike Jones. There wasn’t a stiff in the display.
“You likes my gallery? I got more I ain’t put up. Done run out of wall.”
Dwight looked for the owner of the disembodied voice. The counter was heaped high with albums and records, some in sleeves, others naked, with visible chips in the thick Bakelite; he had to stand on tiptoe and crane his neck to see over them. The vista beyond was even more disorganized. Stacks of sheet music, back numbers of Billboard magazine, and what might have been mimeographed lists of private record collections consumed most of the floor space, with only a tiny aisle between to allow the occupant egress from behind the counter. The debris had spread like ivy up the sides and across the top of an old rolltop desk in an advanced state of collapse, as if unable to bear the burden. Thumb-smeared envelopes and rolls of paper crammed the pigeonholes, a medieval-looking adding machine with a huge black cast-iron handle rode the surf of paper next to a china saucer with a half-eaten sandwich on it and an empty glass bearing the disreputable-looking remains of buttermilk. Or what Dwight hoped was buttermilk. Even the sandwich looked like a relic left over from a lost civilization.
A mountain of manila envelopes stuffed for shipping had proven solid enough to support the portable phonograph, now coming to the end of its record. A slender black hand at the end of a pink sleeve returned the arm to its prop and threw the brake on the turntable. But for that movement, Dwight might have missed the slight figure sitting in a captain’s chair among the detritus. He had on a pink dress shirt with white collar and cuffs, a white silk necktie with a gold clasp to match his studs, and a straw boater tilted away over to one side of his totally bald head, although it would be difficult to picture anyone who looked less like Maurice Chevalier. His legs were crossed in salt-and-pepper trousers, showing six inches of pink-and-black argyle between the cuff of the upper leg and a white suede shoe with a silver buckle. The face behind a pair of smoked glasses was like dark oiled wood, long as an African mask, and bore no trace of a smile. A hand-rolled cigarette smoldered in one corner of his mouth. Dwight recognized the scorched-grain smell. He wasn’t a reefer man himself, but the odor was as much a part of the Detroi
t he knew as pig’s knuckles and collard greens deep-fried in bacon fat.
He nodded toward the pictures. “You really know all these people?”
“Customers. I got the biggest collection of race records west of Harlem, and Harlem ain’t got some of what I got. That’s Johnny Mercer up there in the corner. Steals most of his stuff from old blues tunes. He done bought the whole inventory in ’34. I had to shut down for eight months. They comes through town, they stops here. And they all comes through town.”
“How’d they find out about the place?”
“Word of mouth. Jack Teegarden come here in ’33, right after I opened, walked out a hour later with both arms full of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. After that, you might of thought I was giving away muggles. Ain’t nobody buys music like musicians.”
“I don’t see Billie Holiday.”
“Lady Day, she stopped in once, but she looked like shit, wouldn’t let me take her picture. And she wasn’t looking for music.” He changed the subject—slyly, Dwight thought. “What you like? I just got in some Blind Lemon, ain’t even un-crated it yet.”
“Is your name Gidgy?”
“Depends on what yours is.”
“I’m Dwight Littlejohn.”
“That injun? You look like a Blackfoot.” A bitter little laugh bubbled up from the sunken chest beneath the pink shirt, ending in a smoker’s cough. He sucked in hemp and tapped a pile of ash into a Chock Full O’Nuts can perched atop a pile of sheet music on the desk.
“I’m Earl Littlejohn’s brother.”
“I guess you have to be. Two Littlejohns in one town ought to be related.”
Jitterbug Page 16
