Jitterbug

by Loren D. Estleman

  Canal broke the silence. “Trouble is we ain’t got the manpower. Department’s got more holes in it than the Maginot Line. Three days ain’t what it was before Pearl.”

  “I’ve got an idea where we can find recruits,” Zagreb said.

  chapter twenty-seven

  GIDGY KEPT HIS CAR spotless from habit, but when he got the call from Frankie Orr’s receptionist—English white woman, could talk with a cock in her mouth and make it sound like caviar—he drove it out of the garage on Hastings where he paid an exorbitant fee to the Greek who owned the place to keep it safe from thieves, vandals, and pigeon shit and washed it again in the vacant truck bay of a place he owned a piece of on the East Side. He used a clean bucket and bubble bath, then two coats of Johnson’s Wax, eradicating smudges from the whitewalls with white shoe polish.

  The car was a 1939 Auburn, bottle green with black fenders and running boards, side-mounted spare, and exhaust pipes exposed like plates of ribs on both sides of the hood. He’d taken over the title from a bookie on Fourteenth who didn’t have any use for it on the bottom of Lake Erie with a Chevrolet short block tied around his neck. Gidgy had replaced the garish custom leopard skin upholstery with full-grain black leather, chromed the pipes, and tied a little suede pouch to the gearshift containing the wing bones of an African eagle, his family legacy, smuggled across the Atlantic in a slave ship in the rectum of his great-great-grandfather, the second most powerful witch doctor in his village. The most powerful witch doctor had spiked his broth with toadstools and sold him to white traders while he was insensible.

  That was the legend among the Gitchfields, in any case. Gidgy suspected the old man was a dock laborer who had gotten drunk and fallen into the hold, and that the bones belonged to a chicken that had perished no earlier than 1900, and no farther east than a kitchen in Baltimore. But when your family tree was kindling you snatched at twigs. The pouch had gone with him every place he’d lived since he was fifteen.

  He took Mack to Cadieux, wanting to let the twelve cylinders speak their piece but not daring to. It wasn’t the gasoline; he had twelve forty-gallon drums sitting in a private garage on Michigan. He didn’t want to call attention to a colored man driving a nice car through neighborhoods so white they hurt his eyes. He didn’t admire the houses as they got bigger nor the lawns as they turned a bluer shade of green. That would be like a Jew from the Warsaw Ghetto admiring Goering’s garden.

  He hadn’t wandered far from Paradise Valley in years, and never for more than a few hours. Gidgy felt no special kinship with others of his race—if you believed that old story about his great-great-grandfather, treachery knew no color, and the policy war of 1931 had pitted black against black, with the wops coming in at the end to mop up—but he was sensitive to hostility from outside. He could feel the change for the worse since the hillbillies came up to work the plants. With them, however, he knew where he stood. Grosse Pointe was a confusing mix of New Deal do-gooders and rednecks in shirt boards, and he lacked a program to sort them out. In Detroit his enemies were loud and obvious. Up here he couldn’t tell which marble hall might end in a back room with a white sheet and a hood hanging in it.

  The scenery hadn’t changed much since his last visit. Depressions didn’t peel the paint off mansions or cave in their front porches; they just moved one set of residents out and another in, without affecting the outside. The big-big places, forty-some rooms looking out on Lake St. Clair, were in the same hands they had always been in, stained green with old auto money. Those sons and daughters of machinists only entered the stock market after the crash, picking up blocks of shares in their own companies for pennies on the dollar and then sitting on them, waiting for the economy to turn around. Now they were living off fat defense contracts. When the war ended and people started buying cars again the world would gain several dozen billionaires.

  One thing was missing from the colonials and Queen Annes, not that he’d have noticed if he hadn’t heard the story: the ornamental scrollwork. When the defense drives came along and the country asked the Midwest’s wealthiest citizens what they would donate, they had magnanimously given up their wrought-iron railings. They had replaced them with topiary and decorative walls of brick and stone, straightened their ties and smoothed their skirts, and sat back on their wallets, secure in the knowledge that they had Done Their Part. Somewhere in the ocean, some fuzzy-faced kid might even now be lying in his berth in a submarine, feeling the shudder of enemy depth charges and thanking Grosse Pointe for the square inch of iron fleur-de-lis that stood between him and a watery grave.

  A careful driver, Gidgy kept both hands on the wheel at all times. This increased the discomfort caused by the heavy Colt M-1911 .45 semiautomatic lodged in the chamois leather lefty holster under his right arm, like a goitrous growth. In case the pistol failed him he had a .32 Smith & Wesson revolver in the left saddle pocket of his gabardine jacket. He never went armed in his neighborhood. He figured if someone was willing to come after him in the record shop or in the furnished room around the corner where he lived like a monk—just him and a phonograph and thirty-six suits made to his order at Clayton’s—his card had come up and nothing he did would change that. But he had nightmares about breaking down here in the whitest four square miles south of Vancouver, where a fidgety rich homeowner could sweep him off his doorstep with a charge of double-O buck and there was no one to come forward and say he hadn’t intended to rob the place. Robert Leroy Parker Gitchfield, who prided himself on never having stolen a dime off anyone he hadn’t killed for a better reason, which was spoils, not stealing, lived less in fear of death than of being labeled a common thief when he wasn’t around to tell his side.

  Finally he swung between a pair of granite pillars and up the long limestone drive to Francis Xavier Oro’s house. This was two horizontal planes of concrete separated by a row of opaque glass, commissioned from Frank Lloyd Wright by the auto pioneer whose widow had sold it to Frankie. Gidgy, who had heard the story from Frankie himself, shook his head at the sight of it there among all those Swiss chalets and English Tudors. If he knew that was wrong, why didn’t people with money know it? It depressed him, an intelligent man if not an educated one, to think that brains had no place in the formula for success. He felt he was doomed for life to shoulder the burden of thinking for cretins who could afford to hire it done.

  Climbing the shaded flagstone steps to the painted-steel door he knew he was being watched. A decade at the top had refined Frankie too thoroughly for the gaucherie of armed guards at the gate, but he would have men stationed around the grounds and behind upper-story windows. The battle tactics he himself had introduced to Detroit had superseded the unwritten edict against going after rivals in their homes or endangering their families: the life of his own newborn son had been threatened in the maternity ward, and Big Nabob, the boss of the old Black Bottom and Gidgy’s early mentor, had been shot to pieces along with his blonde mistress in the bedroom of his garish apartment on Frankie’s order, touching off the numbers war. Gidgy himself felt no nostalgia for the passing of the old ways. In his experience, rules of conduct were drawn up for people to obey who didn’t need them.

  The doorbell made no sound at all on his side of the thick steel slab, a bulletproof improvement on Wright’s fiberglass. It was opened by Tino, who accepted the .45 and .32, laid them on a table suspiciously convenient to the door, and patted down the visitor thoroughly but without rancor; Tino liked Gidgy, who in return for Frankie’s ear during an old dispute had gotten him into a whorehouse on Harper that dealt exclusively in light-skinned colored girls from the islands. Beatrice Blackwood, an alumnus, had smoothed the way with the madam, who ordinarily set her sights higher than low-grade muscle, the bodyguards employer notwithstanding. Tino must have had a good time that night, because even friendly drop-ins to the Orr estate had been known to head straight from there to their chiropractors.

  Gidgy followed the big man down the long hallway that bisected the house, then left int
o the west wing. He’d heard Frankie had had the place redesigned to create two separate households, one for his wife, the other for himself, with his kid spending alternate nights with his mother and father. Catholics. He himself had married six times and divorced four. A divorce hadn’t been necessary the last time because technically he was still married to his fifth wife; just because the bitch never signed and sent back the papers didn’t mean she should stand in the way of his happiness. Wife No. 6 hadn’t seen it that way and left him with an empty safe-deposit box at Detroit Manufacturers Bank and a barlow knife between his fourth and fifth ribs.

  Poor Frankie. All that work and money, and now he was forced to live in quarters larger than all of Paradise Valley.

  The room where they ended up was some kind of den. The ceiling was lowered by way of amber glass panels to less than seven and a half feet—causing Tino to duck his head instinctively as he held the door for Gidgy—and lighted indirectly after the fashion of the rest of the house from behind soffits. The muted effect went with the fixtures: steel gray wall-to-wall carpet, walls of palest blue, almost white, a radio-phonograph in a bleached wood cabinet that reminded the visitor of a coffin. A solo violin was playing softly on the turntable; Gidgy’s knowledge of music outside his specialty was spotty, but he thought it was either Fritz Kreisler or Yehudi Menuhin. He took the S-shaped object of bent plywood in the corner for modern art until he saw a stack of buff-colored envelopes on it and realized it was intended for a desk.

  Mounted on one wall was a deluxe map of the world printed in bright colors on cork. It looked at first like a war map. Then Frankie, who was standing in front of it, reached up and drew down a canvas screen attached to a ceiling roller to cover it, and he suspected it represented something else.

  “Gitch, how are you? How’s the store?” He shook Gidgy’s hand.

  “Just fine, Mr. Oro. Jimmy Dorsey was in last week, bought out all my Leadbelly.”

  “That’s fine.” He wasn’t listening. “You know my son Pasquale? I’m showing him around, you’ll be working for him someday.”

  He hadn’t noticed the boy, sitting at the far end of the room in a chair shaped like a potato chip. Gidgy hadn’t seen him in a couple of years, he must’ve been what, nine, ten then. He didn’t appear to have grown any. A pair of crutches with foam-rubber pads leaned against the wall beside his chair. Gidgy said hello and got a grave nod in return. There was no family resemblance that he could see.

  Frankie leaned back against the bentwood desk with ankles crossed and arms folded. He was making an effort to be casual, Gidgy thought, in white flannels and an eggshell-colored cardigan over a blue silk shirt. A foulard scarf, honest to Christ, tucked down inside his collar just like David Niven. He always thought you had to have gone to Oxford to get away with that. At least finish high school.

  But you didn’t laugh at Frankie. Not even in your head.

  “I got a shipment of tires coming up from Akron next week. Think you can unload a couple hundred from Niggertown?” Frankie always used the word without offense. Gidgy, who like him came from a neighborhood where wop, kike, mick, and split were almost terms of affection, accepted it in the same spirit.

  “I thinks so, Mr. Oro. I got somebody at Willow Run. Them boys clocks up the miles on the commute.”

  “Good. Got room in the garage?”

  “It’s pretty full of gasoline right now. I can sell short, make room for maybe fifty. Guy I know has a secondhand furniture store on Oakland, four thousand square feet and lots of it empty, everybody’s hanging on to their old stuff till after the war. I could buy in for twenty-five hundred.”

  “Don’t ever sell short. Nobody ever got to be Henry Ford by taking a loss.” Frankie went to the radio-phonograph and opened the door to the record-storage compartment. It contained a gray steel safe. He worked the dial, removed a brick of bills, peeled some off, and returned the rest to the safe. He closed up and handed the bills to Gidgy. “That’s two thousand. Get a bargain.”

  Gidgy put the bills in his inside breast pocket. Then he waited. Frankie hadn’t called him all the way up here to talk about tires.

  “What are your plans for after the war, Gitch?”

  Shit. Maybe the man was just lonely, no one to talk to but his runty crippled kid, who hadn’t opened his mouth since Gidgy got there. “Drugs.”

  Frankie nodded, approving. “Weed? Horse? Pills are a bitch. Too easily traced.”

  “Horse mostly. Markets solid, never goes below a certain line, I figure it to go up when the boys get back.”

  “In Niggertown?”

  “Everywhere. Them army medics spray morphine around like Flit. Gonna be plenty of vets walking around with Purple Hearts and monkeys on their backs. Too many for the V.A. to bring down.”

  “That’s one of the reasons I like working with you, Gitch. You don’t think like a nigger.” As he spoke, Frankie went back to the canvas screen, pulled it down, and let go. As it snapped up into the roller, the map of the world was exposed. A megaphone-shaped pattern of pins extended eastward from Michigan across Europe.

  “I got confidence in our boys. We’re going to win this war, but we’re going to have to pound the Old World flat to do it. After the Krauts surrender and the rebuilding starts, the shortage of construction materials will make Prohibition look like fly shit on the ledger. I own pine forests in the Upper Peninsula, two brick factories in Toledo, a steel mill in Sandusky.”

  “Sounds almost legit.”

  “That’s the front. They’ll be up to their asses in amputees, they’ll need morphine and penicillin. The Red Cross won’t be able to score enough through regular channels. Then there’s the luxuries, liquor and cigarettes and chocolate bars. Forget whores, the war widows will be underselling us there for the next fifteen years. We’ll make it up in eggs and milk.”

  “You got cows and chickens?”

  “I got the people who got the cows and chickens. I also got connections.” He pulled the screen down again and turned toward the desk, lifting an eight-by-ten envelope off the stack. “Here. Have your people show these around. Call me if they click.”

  The envelope was stenciled DETROIT POLICE DEPT. OFFICIAL BUSINESS. Gidgy unwound the string and pulled out a glossy sheet of cardboardy stock, a photocopy of an artists drawing of a man’s head wearing a cap of some kind, police or military. “Who is it?”

  “That’s what the cops want to know. I’m helping out on an investigation. The lieutenant’s a friend. Just find out if anybody’s seen him and let me know.”

  There were other sheets in the envelope, all identical. He counted fifteen. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. You got my home number?”.

  “You want me to call you here?”

  “Only if it’s outside office hours.” Frankie glanced at his Curvex. “I’ll call you when the tires are in.”

  A black Packard Eight was parked behind the Auburn, where a man in blue serge held open the door while his passenger struggled to separate his four hundred pounds from the backseat. Fat Tony Reno, who kept the sports book downriver, wasn’t getting any skinnier. A rusty Plymouth coupe belched its way up the drive. The Ballista brothers, cheap fuckers loansharking in Pontiac.

  Come for their envelopes.

  Letting out the clutch, Gidgy shook his head over a changing world. No more wrought iron in Grosse Pointe. Southern rednecks tracking chicken shit into Paradise Valley. And Frankie Orr, dreaming of world conquest with his nuts firmly in the grasp of a lowly city lieutenant. The New Deal was full of jokers.

  PART FOUR

  Lights Out

  chapter twenty-eight

  ELIZABETH LET DWIGHT INTO the living room at Sojourner Truth, told him she was late getting ready and to make himself at home, and flew back to the bathroom. He glimpsed yellow robe and her head wrapped in a towel like Carmen Miranda’s headdress only no fruit, and never got the chance to say hello. Alone with the big Zenith, he switched it on and tuned in the ball game. Pitching in relie
f for Trout, Hal Newhouse was smoking the whole Cleveland side in the sixth.

  Earl came in whistling from the bedroom, tucking in the tail of a half-and-half shirt, inexpensive cotton except for a silk collar and cuffs. “What’s the word, brother of mine? Say, who died?” He pulled Dwight s charcoal gray tie out of his coat.

  “I splashed barbecue sauce on the other one.”

  “You can’t wear that to the track. People think you came to bury a horse.” Earl undid the tie, slapping aside Dwight’s hands as he tried to stop him. He jerked it from around his neck, draped it over his own shoulder, and untied his own, gold turtles on a ruby field. Dwight protested, then gave in and put it on. Earl helped him make the ends even. Then he went back into the bedroom and came out tying a green one with red sailboats.

  “How many ties you got?”

  “Gate, I got better things to do with my time than count my ties. Where is that woman? We’ll miss the daily double.”

  “How you feeling?”

  “With my fingers.” He held them up and wiggled them. Then he went into the little yellow kitchen, took down a bottle of Four Roses from a cabinet, and splashed some of its contents into a water tumbler. “How about a bracer? Them bleachers get hard.”

  “No, thanks. And you know what I mean. You tell Elizabeth where you was the other night?”

  “She didn’t ask. I thought maybe you told her.”

  “You know better than that. You a junkie, Earl?” He lowered his voice on the last part.

  “Do I look like one?”

  “You could. I don’t know what one looks like. I thought you was going to start staying away from guys like that Gidgy.”

  “Didn’t say that. You got cash? Track’s no fun you don’t put something down.” He fished a roll of bills out of his pants pocket and unwound the rubber band.