Jitterbug

by Loren D. Estleman

  Earl climbed in on the other side of Elizabeth and punched the starter. “You’re staying with us a couple. You ain’t in no shape to do for yourself.”

  Dwight said nothing. Who was arguing? As they pulled away from the curb he watched with detachment the nurse rolling the empty wheelchair back through the doors of Detroit General Hospital. Receiving, most folks called it, on account of it was all the time receiving patients in a shot and battered condition. Place boasted more doctors and nurses with wound trauma experience than any other hospital outside the theaters of war.

  “Who pulled me out?” Dwight asked then.

  “You mean out of the toilet? Who you think? Who’s in charge of making sure you don’t get your head beat off?”

  He looked at Earl, seeing for the first time that his brother’s right eye was swollen almost shut. It bunched up like balloons when he grinned back.

  Elizabeth said, “Well, the bouncer pretty much had the job finished when you got there. Otherwise I’d be driving you both home. If I knew how to drive.”

  “Thanks, Earl.”

  “Shit, little brother. It’s my job.” He turned out of the driveway onto Grand. “Only I wisht you talked the cops out of hanging on to that Hupmobile stick.”

  Night had fallen, a particularly dark one with almost all the illumination in the city provided by streetlamps and automobile headlights; blackout curtains were a requirement everywhere, and although air-raid drills were less frequent than they had been at the panicky start of the war, the heavy material was still in place in most windows. He’d never seen so many in use at one time. Without visible lights the downtown skyscrapers made black oblongs against a slightly lighter sky. The houses looked evacuated. He hadn’t noticed that before, and wondered if the morphine in his bloodstream had distorted his outlook. It made him feel uneasy, as if he had entered a city preparing for siege.

  Earl and Elizabeth’s block was even more desolate. Theirs was the only car on the street, and the rickety sound of the motor echoed off the blank fronts of the houses on both sides.

  “Sure is quiet,” Elizabeth said.

  “Good.” Earl turned into their driveway. “Some kind of fight happening on Belle Isle. They was talking about it in the lobby when I was waiting for you and Dwight. They said a bunch of whites attacked a colored woman on the bridge, throwed her baby into the river.”

  “My God, Earl!”

  “It’s just crazy talk.”

  Elizabeth made up the studio couch. Dwight had insisted on it and won his point, because it was big enough to sleep only one comfortably, and anyway he wasn’t about to put them out of their bedroom. His jaw was too sore to chew. It was too hot for soup, so she mixed a pitcher of eggnog and he drank two glasses through a straw, the hospital broth he’d had for lunch having had no staying power. The pills he took after supper made him drowsy. Earl lent him his pajamas and helped him into them and Elizabeth tucked him in. He went to sleep saying something about what a good mother she’d make. He didn’t know where he got that, maybe from Mammy Yokum. His and Earl’s mother had never been known to do anything of the sort.

  He had a wet dream. It must have been the morphine or the pills, he didn’t get them as a rule, and when he awoke hearing unfamiliar voices, he was mortified and looked down at himself quickly to see if the stain showed. But the blanket covered him. It took him another minute to place one of the voices as it came to the forefront. It was Gabriel Heatter’s. Someone was listening to the network news.

  “ … including actor Leslie Howard, were aboard the plane when it was reported missing and are believed dead. On the home front, Edward J. Jeffries, Jr., Mayor of Detroit, has deployed two hundred police to quell widespread rioting between Negroes and whites in his city, and may request Michigan Governor Harry Kelly to dispatch units of the state police and national guard. To forestall further violence, all the saloons in the city have been ordered closed and owners of pawnshops and hardware stores instructed to remove all firearms, ammunition, and knives from their shelves and display windows and lock them up in the wake of rumors of atrocities committed by whites against Negroes and vice versa on Belle Isle, a popular recreation spot in the Detroit River. Colored clergymen and civic leaders have denounced the rumors as erroneous. We have reports of motorists, colored and white, pulled from their cars and beaten.

  “In Washington today, President Roosevelt met with …”

  There was a squeal of static, a trill of dance music, laughter from a studio audience, a piece of the Barbasol jingle. Dwight twisted his head, sending a bolt of pure pain from his neck to the top of his skull. Elizabeth, wrapped in her yellow robe, was standing in a crouch in front of the radio with her hand on the tuning knob. The glow from the dial drenched her taut face in a jack-o’-lantern shade of orange.

  “What’s going on?” Dwight asked.

  “I don’t know. I can’t find a station that knows nothing. Most of them are signing off. It’s almost midnight. That’s good, isn’t it? They’d stay on the air if anything was wrong.”

  He recognized the signs of early hysteria. “Where’s Earl?”

  “I don’t know that either. He was fidgety, he said maybe he could find out what was going on. I asked him not to go out. He said he’d be okay on foot, he can run where he can’t take the car. That was an hour ago. I tried to call. It rang and rang and nobody ever answered.”

  “Tried to call where?”

  “The Forest Club.” She went on twisting the knob. “The stations don’t know nothing. One says they’re all over Paradise Valley. The other says they’re downtown.”

  “Who?”

  “White people, Dwight. Who you think? White people.”

  chapter thirty-two

  BURKE CRUISED PAST THE address and parked the big Oldsmobile against the curb across from it. He killed the engine, but no one got out right away. Against the setting sun the house was as individual as a milk cap: two narrow stories of white frame built during the last war from available materials, pegged into a hill with the basement at ground level. It had red-and-white awnings and a shallow porch with potted plants on the railing and a rocking chair that didn’t look as if it had been sat in since the Armistice. A 1939 Buick with a dull coat of dark blue chalky-looking paint was parked nose-first in a separate garage with the doors open.

  “Looks like a place where somebody’s mother lives,” McReary said.

  “So did Ma Barker’s.” Zagreb looked at his Wittnauer: Nine hours had elapsed since the press conference. Time enough for any would-be Jack the Ripper to have fled halfway across Canada. “What’s the name, O’Reilly something?”

  McReary got out his notebook. “Aura Lee Winsted, G.A.R. Her late husband served with the Twentieth Michigan, invalided out at Cold Harbor. She’s still collecting benefits.”

  “We better hurry,” Canal said. “She must be a hundred.”

  “Don’t bet on it. A lot of sweet young things latched themselves on to shaky veterans in their last years. Be getting pension checks till 1990.” Zagreb inspected the load in his .38, then put it back under his arm. “Baldy, you’re with me. You others keep an eye out for Robert Taylor.”

  Canal said, “I got piles on my piles. Let Baldy stick with Burke.”

  “I don’t need you scaring any widows.”

  “She’s heard a thousand war stories. What’s to scare?”

  “Okay, but keep your mouth shut.”

  “That’s when he’s scariest,” McReary said.

  Zagreb and the sergeant climbed the flight of concrete steps leading from the driveway to the front porch. The screen door was hooked. Zagreb rapped on the wooden frame. The woman who came out to peer at their IDs and unhook it stood barely five feet in low heels and weighed ninety pounds. She wore a tailored blue cotton suit with padded shoulders, pinched in at a waist that Canal could have encircled with his big hands. Her hair, worn in a Prince Valiant cut with bangs straight across, was died a corn shade of yellow, a sharp contrast to the leathery ta
n of her face, which when she smiled broke into stacks of wrinkles. She wore orange lipstick and rouge and white-framed eyeglasses with an Oriental slant. She shook hands with both detectives—hers were encased in white cotton gloves—and led them into a living room done all in shades of white and cream and yellow. A white shag throw-turned a camelback sofa into a polar bear and a buttermilk-colored Fada radio shaped like a bullet stood on the shallow fireplace mantel. If Mr. Winsted had left behind any souvenirs of his Civil War service, none was on display in the living room.

  Her offer of lemonade declined, the three sat. The lieutenant asked about Ziska.

  “That’s not his name,” she said. “I don’t think he’s the man you’re looking for, but he looks like the picture in the paper and he drives a gray car, I think it’s a Nash, but I don’t know much about kinds of cars. He’s on invalid leave from the Army Air Corps. He was wounded in combat. Now he sells war bonds.”

  “Not magazine subscriptions?” Zagreb asked.

  She pursed her orange lips, remembering. Then she shook her head. “No. He said war bonds. He’s been living here almost three months. A very nice young man.”

  “Did he say where he was wounded?”

  “The leg. The left one, I think. He limps sometimes.”

  “What battle?” Canal asked.

  Zagreb shot him a sharp look.

  “He didn’t say. I don’t think he likes to talk about it. My Orville was the same way. He talked about his friends in the Twentieth, his sergeant, the things they did in town, but never Cold Harbor. Everything but that.”

  “What name did he use?” Zagreb asked.

  Wrinkles stacked her forehead. “Orville?”

  “Your boarder.”

  “Oh. William Bonney.”

  On the landing outside the apartment, Zagreb asked Mrs. Winsted how long Bonney had been out.

  “All day.” She sorted through a ring of keys attached to a Red Crown tab. “He doesn’t keep regular hours. He goes where the War Department sends him. Toledo sometimes.”

  It was a three-room flat, no kitchen. “This was Orville’s study, where he kept his war mementoes. I donated them to Greenfield Village. We slept separately the last ten years; he had nightmares. I turned the closet into a bathroom after he passed on. These days a person just can’t get along on widow’s benefits.”

  There was a table, a mohair sofa going threadbare on the arms, a three-drawer sideboard supporting a Philco tabletop radio, a National Geographic map of the European Theater on the wall with flag pins stuck in it. Canal went into the bedroom, came out right away shaking his head, and opened the door to the bathroom.

  “Look out!” Zagreb jerked his .38.

  His heart thudded in his ears, a Krupa drum crescendo. Then it tailed off. What had looked like a man jumping out of the bathroom was just an empty uniform hanging on the back of the door. The chocolate brown tunic draped a wooden hanger with khaki trousers folded neatly over the bottom bar and a dress cap with a shiny black visor on the hook above.

  Canal, who had unholstered his own revolver, swiveled his eyes Zagreb’s way, reddened, and returned the gun to his armpit. Savagely he reached up and unhooked the hanger.

  Mrs. Winsted was watching from the open door to the landing. “He must not be working today after all. He always wears it when he sells bonds.”

  “Zag.”

  Canal had exposed a black waterproof poncho hanging behind the uniform.

  Zagreb said, “Yeah.”

  Canal searched the uniform pockets while the lieutenant went through the shirts and underwear in the sideboard. The corner of a small square of stiff paper stuck up out of the crack between the bottom and back of the top drawer. He pulled it out. It was a gasoline ration stamp.

  “That doesn’t really mean anything, does it?” asked Mrs. Winsted. “Everyone has stamps.”

  “It may mean something that he has just one.”

  “He probably carries them with him. It’s a good habit to get into. I’m always going off and forgetting mine and having to come back.”

  “Nothing in the pockets,” Canal said.

  “Check the bathroom.”

  The landlady had come into the apartment and stood looking around. “He’s the neatest tenant I’ve ever had. Must be the military training. Orville was the same way until the last couple of years.” She looked at the gateleg table. “That’s where I put his meals when he’s been too busy to stop anywhere. I never charge him for them. I consider it part of my contribution to the war effort.”

  Canal swung shut the medicine cabinet. “Clean. Toothbrush and paste and shaving stuff. No prescriptions.”

  “How often does the trash man come around?” Zagreb asked Mrs. Winsted.

  “Just once a week now. Wednesday. It used to be twice, but they’re all in the service now.”

  “Where do you put your trash?”

  “There’s a bin out back.”

  “Could we take a look?”

  “Certainly.” She touched the bare table. “I wonder what he’s done with the oilcloth.”

  He drove back from Warren in a state of cold fury.

  His supervisor at the messenger service had given him only five packages to deliver that morning, but the destinations were literally all over the map: one in Hamtramck, two in Birmingham, a fourth in Royal Oak, and the last in Warren, where he had been forced to simmer in a waiting room for two and a half hours because the package was a level 4, meaning it was to be placed in the hands of the addressee only, and the addressee was stuck in a meeting. He couldn’t even go away and come back later because the man’s secretary had no idea how long he’d be hung up and said he had to catch a train for Chicago as soon as he came out. There was the whole day shot. He was going to have to find a job that gave him as much freedom without running him ragged because there weren’t enough employees to go around.

  To make matters worse, he’d blown a tube or something in his car radio. The dial glowed when he switched it on, but all he got when he twisted the tuning knob was various kinds of static. It wouldn’t have meant so much if he hadn’t been tied up all day. For all he knew the war had burst wide open. He had an uneasy feeling he was missing something important.

  On Woodward, waiting for the light to change at Grand, he spotted a Detroit News box under a streetlamp and strained to see if he could make out the headline on the issue on display. His own face stared back at him from the front page.

  He set the brake and got out, leaving the Nash in the traffic lane with the door open, thumbed a nickel into the slot, and snatched out a copy. As he turned away, a man in a wilted-looking Palm Beach suit and cocoa straw hat was looking at him on the sidewalk. He stared back until the man lowered his head and resumed walking.

  The driver of the car behind his was blowing his horn when he slid back under the wheel. The light had changed. He drove through the intersection, then swung over into a parking space in the next block, leaning over to skim the story on the front page in the pool of light from the streetlamp. Then he threw the paper into the backseat and wheeled back out into traffic. He broke the wartime speed limit in the first quarter mile.

  Zagreb and Canal followed Mrs. Winsted downstairs, through a kitchen with a gas refrigerator and range, and out the screen door in back. She turned on the floodlight over the driveway. From behind the steamshovel-shaped trash bin they could see the Oldsmobile parked on the street, its interior in shadow. Zagreb hoped McReary wasn’t talking Burke’s ear off. Baldy was a stakeout disaster.

  He tipped back the lid. The stench of rotted vegetables came out in a gust. He took off his coat, exposing his shoulder harness, draped it over the iron railing of the back steps, and leaned in to sort through the stained paper sacks and empty cardboard boxes inside.

  “I could use a hand here,” he said.

  Canal said, “Shit,” under his breath—the landlady was standing on the back stoop, watching—and peeled out of his coat.

  Zagreb pushed aside a bundl
e of newspaper, but it rolled back down against his arm. When he picked it up to shove it out of the way, its weight surprised him. He grasped it in both hands and tore it open. It was stuffed tight with ration tickets.

  “What?” The sergeant couldn’t see.

  “Kilroy was here.”

  Tires scrunched to a halt on the asphalt driveway. Zagreb looked at the blunt hood of a gray Nash. From old habit his glance flicked down to the license plate—JT-6829—then up to the face behind the windshield, automatically superimposing upon it the artists sketch. For a microsecond, a splinter in the eye of Time that Zagreb would relive for the rest of his life, their gazes locked.

  Then everything was movement. Gears crashed, Zagreb pulled his hands out of the bin and reached under his arm, the car went into reverse, the black Oldsmobile started up and swung away from the opposite curb into a U-turn, Burke trying to block the driveway. Canal, whose reflexes were fast for a man half his size, went into target-range stance in front of the garage, perpendicular to the street with his right arm extended and his revolver at the end. It barked twice. The windshield on the driver’s side collapsed.

  But the car kept moving, picking up speed as it bumped over the curb. Its bulbous left-front fender struck the sleeker one of the Oldsmobile, shattering a headlight. Another crash of gears and then the Nash shot forward, two wheels jumping the sidewalk.

  Now Zagreb and Canal were in the street, broken glass crunching underfoot, their shooting arms raised in perfect parallel, guns double-banging like carpenter’s hammers slightly out of synch. A bullet struck the sloping trunk with a clank. Another clipped the side-view mirror on the driver’s side.

  Canal clawed open the back door of the Oldsmobile and piled in. Zagreb put a foot inside, pounding the roof with the hand holding his gun. “Go! Go! Go!”