Jitterbug

by Loren D. Estleman

  Canal winked at McReary. “We got to get Zag laid. He’s got fucking on the brain.”

  Zagreb kicked over the chair. The clatter made everyone jump. Immediately he held up both palms. “Forget it. I’m sorry. Forget it.”

  “We’re all in the same boat,” McReary said.

  “Don’t say that, okay? Say anything but that. You sound like that prick Brandon.” The lieutenant plucked a Chesterfield out of his pack. The Ronson wouldn’t fire, and he threw it and the cigarette out the window.

  Canal and Burke exchanged glances. Burke cleared his throat and asked if there was anything from the lab.

  “Not yet. I gave them the number here. This is the last time we’ll be using the room, and it’s the only place we can talk without some son of a bitch in a blue bag listening in. I’d just as soon sell the story to Hearst myself and cut out the middleman.”

  “It isn’t just the uniform boys,” Burke said. “Brandon didn’t make inspector by pretending to be Garbo.”

  McReary said, “Carton of cigs says even if we make the collar he’ll grab it.”

  “I don’t care who gets the collar. I want this cocksucker in a cage.” Zagreb looked at Burke. “You look too comfortable. Call the lab.”

  Burke got up from the bed and went out.

  Canal tried to raise the window another few inches. When it wouldn’t budge he put his detecting skills to work and discovered that two nails had been pounded into the frame to prevent second-story men from opening it far enough to climb inside. No air was stirring through the six-inch gap. “Somebody in the store had to have seen something,” he said.

  Zagreb said, “The husband’s no help. He had a seizure right in front of the prowl-car cops. They took him away in the same ambulance with the security guard. I don’t think he saw anything anyway. Guard was DOA at Receiving, never recovered consciousness. Some of the employees were going off shift at the time of the attack. I borrowed a couple of uniforms from the First and Ninth to run them down. Both of them are waiting for their call-up. They’ve got nothing to gain from running to Brandon or the press. They’ll be up to their ass in the enemy in eight weeks.”

  “Welcome to the club.” Canal surrendered to the heat and peeled off his coat. He looked even bigger in his white shirt, sweat through along the strap of his shoulder rig.

  Burke came back after five minutes. The hallway where the telephone was was even hotter than the room and he was sweating like an overworked draft horse.

  Two sets of prints on the briefcase,” he reported. “One’s the floorwalker’s; he picked it up. Other set matches a print on the steel scabbard we found inside the case. There’s traces of blood inside the scabbard and the case. They’re testing it for type now.”

  “They say they’re sending the prints to Washington?” Zagreb asked.

  Burke nodded. Seeing that Canal had stripped down, he took his coat and hung it on the back of a chair. It was the hottest June in a decade.

  “Put your coats back on. We’re getting copies of those prints and calling every recruiting center in the city.”

  “I thought I’d let them draft me,” Burke said.

  “This guy wears a uniform. He isn’t selling the ration stamps he steals; he’s taking them out of circulation, like a good American. Good Americans volunteer for military service.”

  Canal shrugged into his wilted coat. “Then why ain’t he killing Japs or Krauts instead of Detroiters?”

  “Because Uncle Sam doesn’t put cuckoos in uniform, that’s why.”

  McReary, amused, looked glum. “Since when?”

  Zagreb ignored him. “This guy was rejected for military service, probably on a psycho, and he didn’t do cartwheels over it. He hit the beaches in his own hometown. But his prints are on record. They print you at the same time they’re sticking their finger up your ass and telling you to piss in a cup. That’s to make sure they don’t induct known criminals.”

  “We don’t know none of this for sure,” Canal said: “All we know is some kind of uniform’s missing from the inventory the Jew cleaner kept, and maybe the Polack woman in Hamtramck was buying a magazine subscription. You put those two things together and came up with Willie Gillis with a knife.”

  “A bayonet. That scabbard’s standard army issue. Kilroy’s got military on the brain. If you got a better theory we’ll run it out.”

  The telephone rang in the hall. McReary, standing closest to the door, went out.

  Canal said, “Well, I ain’t got one. But they don’t hang on to them prints. They send them on to Washington, where they go into about a million files.”

  “We can narrow that to thousands by sorting out the rejects.”

  Burke said, “Maybe hundreds. There can’t be that many cuckoos in the metro area.”

  Canal snorted.

  “Some nuts fool doctors.” Zagreb speared a cigarette between his lips and patted his pockets for his lighter, forgetting. Burke struck a match. “Thanks. We’ll put the psychos on top of the list, but we have to include ulcers and flat feet.”

  “Be easier if we had a description,” Canal said.

  “A name would be nice, too, and a social security number if he’s a Roosevelt man. Or we could sit around Thirteen Hundred drinking gin rickies and wait for him to turn himself in. Since we don’t have any of those things, let’s use some of those extra rations Uncle Sam lets us have for shoes.”

  McReary returned and shut the door. “That was Bertriel on the horn, from the Ninth. He’s with a Cathleen Dooley in Redford; she lives with her mother. Part-time clerk at Hudson’s. He thinks she might have got a look at Kilroy. A good look.”

  “Thank Christ.” Canal reached for his coat. “I traded all my shoe rations to my brother-in-law for liquor.”

  chapter twenty-six

  THEY PARKED THE BLACK Oldsmobile behind a Michigan Ice Company wagon drawn up to the curb. The wagon’s inventory was dripping through the tailgate into a puddle on the asphalt. When they braked, a sharp earthy stench announced to the occupants in front and back that they’d rolled into a pile of fresh horseshit.

  Burke, who cleaned and maintained the car, swore and smacked the steering knob with the heel of his hand. “Why don’t they drive trucks? Even the dairy companies are selling their nags for glue.”

  “Why make the investment?” Canal asked. “Everybody’s getting Frigidaires come peacetime.”

  “Not me. Katy can go on dumping out the pan. That’s five minutes she’s not busting my balls ’cause I’m not commissioner.”

  “You tell her it’s because you signed your last sergeant’s exam with an X?”

  Zagreb stepped down onto the sidewalk. “You boys stay here and duke it out. Baldy and I are going in with Rembrandt.” He tipped his head toward the lanky plainclothesman unfolding his articulated legs from the backseat. He was carrying a flat tin of charcoals and a sketch pad the size of a billboard.

  Canal said, “Burke and me ain’t good enough for Redford?”

  “You guessed it, Starv,” McReary said. “I can’t figure out why everybody calls you a dumb Polack.”

  “Me neither. My grandfather wiped Polack off his saber every Sunday.”

  Zagreb slammed the door and leaned on the sill. “This is a girl who still lives with her mother. I don’t want to scare her off by coming in with a pair of gorillas.”

  “Go ahead. Me and Canal’ll sit here and pick fleas off our backs.” Burke popped the glove compartment and took out a flat pint of Bushmill’s. Suddenly he grinned at the back of the ice wagon. “Hey, we can have this panther piss on the rocks.”

  The three men who had gotten out started up the stoop of the little brick house. The sketch artist asked Zagreb if his men always did their drinking right out on the street.

  “Just since we confiscated six cases from a market operation on Watson.” He grinned. “You want to join the Racket Squad, Officer?”

  The man shook his head gravely. “I’m M.R.A.”

  “I thought th
e Supreme Court threw that out,” McReary said.

  Zagreb was still grinning. “Not NRA. M.R.A. Moral Rearmament. You know, keep Mae West off the screen.”

  “That’s the Catholic Church,” said the artist. “We’re more serious. We started the national defense movement in 1939. People make fun of us, but if we got started ten years sooner, we wouldn’t have this mess in Europe.”

  McReary said, “Don’t forget Japan.”

  “The Japs were a lost cause from the start. Did you know there’s no word for morality in any of the Oriental languages?”

  “Did you know Lana Turner spelled backwards is Anal Renrut?”

  “Okay, cut it out. Time to serve and protect.” The lieutenant knocked on the door.

  It was opened almost immediately by a stocky young man in a Detroit police uniform. Zagreb introduced him as Officer Bertriel, who filled them in from the contents of his pocket notebook and led them into the living room. The lieutenant shook hands with Mrs. Dooley, a tiny woman in her early fifties with finger-waved hair washed in a silver-blue rinse, seated in an armchair in a gray dress closed at the throat with a small emerald clasp. Cathleen, her daughter, was sitting on the end of the davenport. She was larger than her mother and dark-haired, wearing a white blouse and gray calf-length skirt, strap sandals on her bare feet, and leg makeup to simulate nylons. She nodded at each of the three newcomers, but kept her hands folded in her lap. She looked pale.

  The living room was almost antiseptically clean. Seating himself, Zagreb suspected the plastic slipcovers had just been removed from the upholstered furniture. A fifteen-year-old radio stood in a corner on spindled legs under a beaded scarf and a bowl of wax fruit. On the wall above the armchairs hung a large plaster crucifix across from one of those trick pictures of Christ whose eyes were open or closed depending on the angle one looked at it. McReary, the son of Protestant parents who hadn’t seen the inside of a church since he was ten, got up from his armchair and sat on the end of the davenport opposite Cathleen Dooley so he couldn’t see it. It was sort of spooky. A jumble of family pictures in silver frames crowded the mantel of the imitation fireplace, and a low Chippendale-style tea table displayed copies of Collier’s, Life, and The Michigan Catholic.

  “I told the policeman I don’t think that young man killed anyone,” Cathleen Dooley said. “He was a soldier.”

  “Not a sailor,” Zagreb prompted.

  “No. They wear white caps and those cute bell-bottoms. He had on a cap with a shiny visor and a cape.”

  “Cape?”

  “One of those waterproof things, rubber or something. It was raining, or it had been. The street was wet when I went outside.”

  “Was he carrying a briefcase?”

  “No.”

  “No he wasn’t or no you didn’t see one?”

  She frowned, concentrating. She wore bright red lipstick, and it exaggerated both the expression and her pale coloring. “I suppose he might have had something under his cape. But he was too good-looking to kill anyone. Killers are small and ugly, like Peter Lorre.”

  “We’ll get to that. What color was his uniform?”

  “Brown.”

  “Brown like army?”

  “I think so. I don’t know.”

  “Officer? Enlisted man? Did you see any gold?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The slicker would’ve covered his insignia.” McReary sounded smitten. He admired large-boned women with slim ankles.

  “Tall or short?”

  “Oh, tall.”

  “Very tall?”

  “Very. Not like a giant, I don’t mean that. Just nice and tall.”

  “How tall are you, Cathleen?” Zagreb asked.

  She hesitated. “Five-six.”

  “Tell the truth, dear.” Mrs. Dooley looked at the lieutenant. “She’s five-eight. Her father was six feet five. He laid the bricks for this house without help. I keep telling her she should be proud of her height. It’s no picnic going through life having to ask strangers to take things down from shelves.”

  Zagreb kept his attention on the girl. “How much taller was he than you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Shit. “If he didn’t do it, that will come out. We just want to talk to him. He might have seen something.”

  “I wasn’t being stubborn. I couldn’t tell how much taller he was because I was looking down at him. I was on a stepladder. I was putting up a curtain display.”

  “Then how do you know he was tall?”

  “He looked tall. He was very slim and everything was in—proportion.” Her cheeks showed color for the first time. She looked down at her hands. “He said he was getting married next month.”

  Zagreb was glad he’d left Burke and Canal in the car. Canal would have broken something by now.

  “Cathleen, this is Officer Gleason. He’s a police artist. You can help him draw a picture of the man you saw.”

  “Really? Just like on Gangbusters?”

  “Just like that, only less noisy. But you have to give him a description. Don’t just say he was good-looking. Some women probably think Peter Lorre’s good-looking.”

  “Blind women,” McReary said.

  “Shut up. I mean quiet. Cathleen?”

  The lanky artist pulled up an ottoman and sat down, bracing the open pad against his raised knees. He placed a squat piece of charcoal against the paper.

  “He looked like a movie star.”

  “Cathleen!”

  She looked at Zagreb. Her lips made a defiant red line, like a Kilroy cut. “I mean a specific movie star. I just can’t think of his name.” She turned. “Ma, you remember. Billy the Kid. We saw it last summer.”

  “I can’t help you, child. All the actors look alike to me since Valentino died. I cried for a week.”

  “Robert Taylor.”

  They all looked at Officer Bertriel standing next to the blinking Christ.

  “I like Westerns,” he said.

  Cathleen Dooley went up to her room and came back with an armload of copies of Photoplay and Screen World. She and Zagreb and McReary and Bertriel went through them while Mrs. Dooley went to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. It was McReary who came up with a picture of Robert Taylor in uniform, smoking a cigarette on the set of Waterloo Bridge. Cathleen shrieked when she saw it.

  “That’s him!” Then her forehead wrinkled. “You don’t suppose it really was him?”

  McReary, whose miswired scowl said he was pleased with himself for finding the shot, said he’d be sure and get her an autograph at the booking.

  The page was torn out and Gleason, the artist, clipped it to the top of his pad with a borrowed hairpin. Cathleen, swept up into the hunt, stood behind him. Together they put a visored cap on Taylor’s sleek head, lightened the hair at his temples, and increased the space between his eyes. After Gleason had erased and drawn the chin along slightly weaker lines she pronounced it a fair likeness.

  Back in the car, Zagreb passed the sheet over the seat for Burke and Canal to admire.

  “Wait a minute.” Canal sat up straight. “I seen this guy somewhere.”

  “See Bataan?” Zagreb asked.

  “Holy shit.”

  Burke grinned. “This mean we get a trip to Hollywood?”

  McReary said, “Forget it. Those gunboats of yours won’t fit inside King Kong’s footprints at Grauman’s.”

  They dropped Gleason off at 1300. Zagreb told Burke to drive on.

  “Where to?”

  “Go up Jefferson. Maybe we can catch a breeze off the river.”

  “Ain’t we going to get copies made?’ Burke asked.

  Zagreb said, “Let’s talk about that.”

  “What’s to talk about? We got the asshole’s picture.”

  “Put yourself in the asshole’s place.”’

  McReary said, “That’s a stretch.”

  “Shut the fuck up. That horse isn’t around now. You can stop trying to impress her.”

  �
�You’re talking about the woman I love.”

  “You’re Kilroy,” Zagreb told Burke. “You get back home tonight from a good day’s slashing, pick up your milk and the News, open the paper, and there’s your kisser on the front page. What do you do?”

  “You mean after I shit a brick?” Burke waited for the light to change at Jefferson. “Go underground.”

  “Anybody would, and ordinarily that’d be good enough for me. That was before this fucker took his act to fucking Hudson’s downtown. That’s like sticking it up our ass and breaking it off. I want him walking around where we can get at him. I want a name and address to go with his picture. I want to pull him out of his house and throw him down on the sidewalk on his face and stand on his neck and yank his wrists behind him and hook the cuffs on and make ’em bite. That won’t happen if we put him in tonight’s early edition.”

  “Sounds personal.”

  “You’re goddamn right it’s personal. First time I’ve felt like this since December ’41.”

  Canal uncovered his teeth, but it only made him look wolfish. “You felt that way, how come you ain’t out busting Japs?”

  “Roberta and I were together then. I thought I was needed at home.” Zagreb watched the scenery roll past. “Nobody needs me now.”

  They were passing the sprawling Stroh’s brewery, chimneys pouring charcoal smoke into the sky to rival the coke ovens at Rouge. Canal cranked his window down the rest of the way to smell the river, or maybe the hops. “You’re counting plenty on those fingerprints being on file. Even then it’ll take time. Meanwhile all we got is his briefcase and bayonet scabbard. He’s still got the part that cuts.”

  “We’ll hoof his picture around the recruiting centers like I said. Then if the FBI craps out too we’ll go public.”

  McReary groaned. “Drop me off at Woolworth’s. I’m out of Dr. Scholl’s.”

  Burke said, “If he slices up another old lady and it gets out we had his picture and didn’t circulate it, Witherspoon will see us off on the next troop ship to the Aleutians. Be jitterbugging with polar bears come Christmas.”

  They drove along with this vision past the Belle Isle bridge, already shuddering under the weight of cars. In a rationed economy the island offered the only escape from the dead-hammer heat of the city.