Jitterbug

by Loren D. Estleman

  Burke cramped the wheel and pressed down the pedal, turning the U into an O. Zagreb bounced down onto the seat, drawing in his other leg just as the car’s momentum swung the door shut. As they straightened out, picking up speed, Burke flipped on the siren. McReary unhooked the handset from the dash to call for backup.

  “What the fuck he come back for?” Canal was panting. “He must’ve seen the papers, heard the radio. Why didn’t he just keep going?”

  “He came back for something,” Zagreb said.

  “What, his razor?”

  “No. His uniform.”

  chapter thirty-three

  DWIGHT PUT ON THE clothes he’d worn home from the hospital, the ones he’d had on when he was beaten in the men’s room at the Club Trocadero. Earl and Elizabeth had spent the night in the waiting room and had not thought to go home and bring back a change. Just sitting on the toilet lid, raising one leg to put on his pants, sent waves of pain throughout his body, but he’d refused Elizabeth’s help and didn’t want to take any medication because he needed to stay alert. When he pried himself to a standing position and looked at his reflection in the mirror above the sink, he thought he looked as much like Joe Louis as he had Saturday night, only now it was after the Schmeling fight.

  There was blood on his shirt. On a sudden inspiration he picked up his suit coat, groped in the pocket on the right side, and brought out the necktie Earl had bought him to celebrate his big day at the track. When he put it on and dragged down the knot, it covered the worst of the stains. It was what the well-dressed search parties were wearing this season.

  When he came out of the bathroom, Elizabeth was dressed, in a one-piece frock and the platform shoes she had worn to the fairgrounds. “I’m going with you. You ain’t in-shape to drive.”

  “You don’t know how. Anyway, somebody has to stay here in case Earl comes back or calls.”

  “Look at your poor face.” Her voice broke.

  It hurt his split lip to grin, but he managed it. “You ought to see the other guy’s fist.”

  “Dwight, I’m scared.”

  “You know Earl. He’s probably pitching pennies.”

  “I’m scared for you.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that, so he said he’d be back soon.

  He was relieved to see the street was quiet, even though it was an unnatural quiet that under ordinary circumstances would have disturbed him. Quiet came before and after trouble. Trouble was noisy.

  The A started sluggishly; all that condensed humidity on the manifold and wires. It was a warm night, but his blood was running slow from drugs and aftershock, and the damp in the upholstery made him shiver. He turned on the heater.

  After a few blocks the quietness began to get eerie. Even the curfew, spottily enforced as it was, hadn’t been this successful at keeping people off the streets. There was always someplace to go late at night in a city like Detroit, blind pigs and twenty-four-hour coffeehouses. Sojourner Truth seemed to be holding its breath.

  He welcomed his first glimpse of a pair of headlights as he moved farther east. He stopped to let a streetcar pass, its row of lighted windows and silhouetted passengers a cheerful vote for normality.

  The car had become uncomfortably warm. He turned off the heater and cranked down his window. He smelled cooling asphalt, the scorched odor that clung to bricks and concrete overheated during the day. A sharp stench of fresh horseshit, left by an ice wagon or a mounted police patrol, crept into his nostrils, not an entirely unpleasant smell under the circumstances. There was life in the city, reassuringly mundane.

  As he neared Jefferson, a darting light caught his eye from the left side of the street. Someone was trotting his way on foot, waving a flashlight. He downshifted and applied the brake, but he kept his grip on the hand throttle. Other circles of light approached the car behind the first.

  Someone leaned his weight on the running board, depressing the springs on that side. A flashlight flared in his face, blinding him. Then it was switched off.

  “Sorry about that, colored brother. I had to see was you black first.” Something metal snicked in the void: the safety catch of an automatic.

  As Dwight’s vision readjusted itself, he saw a broad male face framed in the open window, thick-manteled along Masai lines, with a wide flat nose and a downturned cicatrix of a mouth, as if it had been carved into the face with a knife.

  “Who are you?” Dwight asked.

  “Volunteer with the Reverend Horace White of the Plymouth Congregational Church. We done been deputized to restore order.”

  “Deputized by who?”

  “Well, that’s still being worked out. Cops don’t want us going heeled!”

  “You got a gun.”

  He waved it, a shiny piece that looked like a trick cigarette lighter. It twinkled under the corner lamp. “Just this little old .25. You wisht you had one too, you heard what I heard. Maybe you does. Where you headed?”

  “The Forest Club.”

  “How come?”

  “I’m looking for my brother.”

  “Your brother bust you up like that?”

  “No. He got me away from the ones that did.”

  “Well, you turn around and go back home. Your brother be along directly, if he ain’t dead or in jail.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Coloreds say a colored woman and child got murdered on the Belle Isle bridge. Whites say a gang of coloreds raped a white woman there and kilt her. Either way there’s folks running around with rocks and sticks.”

  “And guns.”

  The man smiled for the first time, showing more teeth than Dwight had ever seen in one mouth. “I could swing or throw, I be in the nigger leagues.”

  “I got to find my brother.”

  The smile shut off like a light. “Just don’t come back and say you wasn’t warned.”

  The man pushed himself off the running board and walked back the way he’d come. There was a conference of swirling flashlight beams, then they split up and went off in different directions.

  He took side streets from there. Something told him there would be more interruptions if he used the main through-fares. Then, three blocks from the Forest, he saw more lights and a row of sawhorses painted with red-and-yellow diagonal stripes erected across the street. A police barricade. He killed his lights, drifted over to the curb, and set his brakes. From there on he’d be better off on foot.

  “Hey! Hey!”

  The cry, coming from behind as he backtracked to the previous block, spurred him to a faster walk; he was in shadow and thought he could vanish if he pretended he hadn’t heard. Then a whistle shrilled.

  “Stop! Police!”

  He stopped. He knew better than to turn. Footsteps came up swiftly from behind him, then stopped.

  “Put your hands on top of your head and turn around.”

  He did so. A flashlight beam, several times stronger than the one he had already faced, struck him full in the eyes. He squinted and waited for it to be turned off. It remained on.

  “Why the hell didn’t you stop?” The voice was full of gravel.

  “I stopped.”

  “I meant the first time I yelled. You deaf?”

  “I didn’t think you meant me.”

  “You see any other niggers around? You see anyone else around? What the hell happened to your face? You been mixing it up?”

  “I got attacked in a men’s room.”

  “Try to blow somebody didn’t want blowed?”

  “No, sir. I just wanted to use the urinal.”

  “Where was this toilet?”

  “The Trocadero.”

  “Well, la-de-fuckin’-da. When?’

  “Last night.”

  “Them bruises look pretty fresh.”

  “I got stitches under this bandage.” He waggled the elbow on that side of his head.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Dwight Littlejohn.”

  “What you doing out past c
urfew?”

  “Looking for my brother.”

  “He lost? How old is he?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Don’t he know the way home? That’s old enough, even for a jig”

  Dwight said nothing.

  “Let’s see some ID.”

  The flashlight moved down then, to the middle of his body. It was intimidating in appearance: as long as Dwight’s forearm and encased in hard black rubber. Everything a cop carried was a potential, weapon, from the handcuffs on his belt to his thick rubber soles. This cop was big, all Detroit cops were big, a massive dark silhouette gleaming here and there—his sidearm, the polished oak stick hanging from his belt down past his knees like a monster dick—with purple balloons swirling around him. Another couple of minutes’ exposure and that powerful beam might have cooked Dwight’s retinas for good.

  He had his thumb almost in his hip pocket when he remembered he hadn’t taken his wallet.

  He played for time. His brain was as slow to get started as the Model A. The damn painkillers had deadened all his best instincts. “What’s the trouble, Officer?”

  “Nothing a great big shipment to Africa wouldn’t fix. Come on, come on. You playing with a hole in your pocket or what?”

  Something made a loud clank in the direction of the police barricade at the other end of the block. Patrol car headlights illuminated the area. Dwight saw the flat cap of an officer as he bent down to retrieve his nightstick from the sidewalk. The big cop turned his head that way two inches.

  Good as it was going to get.

  Dwight spun around and ran, propelling himself forward as much to run out of his own dizziness as to get away. He knew he weaved a little. Later when he’d had a chance to think about it he’d figure it might have saved his life. The cop didn’t shout or blow his whistle. Dwight heard something, a flat clap like a book hitting the floor, and kept running, turning a corner he sensed was there but couldn’t see, it was that dark and he still had the purple balloons. He heard the noise again, flattened further by the corner of the building that had interjected itself between him and it. Only then did he realize what it was.

  He couldn’t believe he was being shot at. Why was he being shot at? For running? Jesus Christ, for running? If he felt better he’d have been scared.

  What strength he had snapped like a string. He slowed to a trot, then a walk. His pulse was hammering in all his cuts and bruises, his cracked ribs pinched his lungs as he gasped for air, sharp pricks as if he were being stabbed repeatedly with an ice pick. He couldn’t tell if the pounding he heard was in his ears or if the cop was closing in, taking aim at his back. He wondered, his body screaming the way it was, if he’d even feel the bullet.

  Ahead of him the sky glowed green. Then it glowed pink. Then green again. He recognized the neon sign of the bowling alley next to the Forest Club. He found comfort in it. The world couldn’t be falling to pieces if they were still bothering to feed juice to the sign.

  He made a game of it. If he could make another five steps before he was shot down, made that, if he could make another five, made that, another five still, now he was on the sidewalk in front, now he was reaching for the door, now his hand was on the handle, now he was pulling it open, now he was climbing over the threshold, the steep threshold, the Mount McKinley of thresholds, now he was in. The door sighed shut behind him, and there was no bullet, no gun, no cop. Fat fucker had probably been too lazy even to pursue him around the first corner.

  He was in the Forest, but it wasn’t the Forest, not like this, not at this hour of a balmy night late in June. Where was the music? Where were the people? The juke was lit up, but it was silent. The rose-colored lights burned softly above the bar, the big mirrored ball, veteran of a hundred dance marathons before the end of the Depression finished all that, dangled from the ceiling striking reflected sparks over the empty littered dance floor. Just for him?

  “Back right on out that door or I’ll blow you through it.”

  Not just for him.

  “Beatrice?” He shielded his eyes. His pupils were threatening to secede from his body.

  “Dwight? Dwight Littlejohn?”

  He spotted her then, standing in front of the bar in the low-cut black evening dress she wore most nights, lowering an antique shotgun with two great big curly hammers like iron ears and the barrels sawed off clear back to the wooden stock. She eased the hammers forward, one at a time.

  “What happened here?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Here.”

  “I’m looking for Earl.”

  “He’s in back.” She swiveled a shoulder in the direction of the door behind the bar. She was still holding the shotgun in both hands across her thighs, like a baton.

  It was a small room with a desk and a lamp, an oddly domestic one with a fat china base and bluebirds printed on the paper shade. Cartons of Old Taylor and Ten High were stacked against the back wall. Earl was sitting in the desk chair, an ordinary kitchen job with a steel-tube frame, facing the door. His legs were splayed out in front of him and he had the coat of his zoot suit folded over his arms in his lap. He smiled when Dwight came in, showing his gold tooth. His face shone with sweat and the white of his bruised eye formed a glittering crescent between the puffed lids.

  “Why so late, Gate?” he said. “Take the slow freight?”

  “Car didn’t want to start. You all right?”

  “Fine as shine, little brother. You leave Lizzie all alone?”

  “The neighborhood’s quiet. I didn’t know what we might run into. What’s going on?”

  “Night started out the same as all the rest,” Beatrice said. She was leaning against the doorframe, the shotgun dangling at her side, her other hand gripping that arm. “Drinkin’ and dancin’, dancin’ and drinkin’. Then some horselick I never seen before grabbed the mike away from the singer and said a bunch of whites raped a colored woman and strangled her and throwed her and her baby off the Belle Isle bridge.

  “You’d of thought somebody yelled fire. Everybody went tearing for the door. Earl tried to stop them.”

  “Everybody was having such a good time,” he said. “I said, why bust up the party?”

  Dwight didn’t like the played-out-record sound of his brother’s voice. Earl never got tired. “What’d they do?”

  Beatrice said, “I didn’t see it. I just heard about it. Maybe it ain’t true. I don’t believe that Belle Isle story neither.”

  “Tell me so I won’t believe it,” Dwight said.

  “Twenty or so boys stopped a streetcar, just stood on the tracks in a bunch so the motorman had to pull the brake. They piled in and pulled out all the white folks riding on it and beat the shit out of them. Men and women.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Stopped some cars, too. Busted open the windows with bricks and dragged the drivers and passengers out onto the street and stomped them. I heard glass busting. Not for a while now, though. Maybe they went on home.”

  “Maybe they didn’t,” Earl said. “They wasn’t tired enough to just stop. Should of went on dancing. Everybody was having such a good time.”

  “I called the ambulance twenty minutes ago. Probably all tied up in the white neighborhoods.”

  “An ambulance what for?” Dwight asked.

  Earl said, “It don’t hurt now. It did some at first. Well, bad. I’m cold, though. How come you went out without no coat, little brother? Catch your death.”

  “Why don’t you put yours on?”

  “Can’t. I’m using it.”

  Dwight looked down then, at the coat in Earl’s lap and what it was soaked with. The entire front of his shirt below the tab of his racetrack tie was stained almost black. Dwight’s knees buckled and he followed them on down and threw his arms around his brother, holding him tight as if he could stop the bleeding with his own body. It had seeped through Earl’s coat and he could feel it, clammy-slippery, through his shirt.

  “Razors got no place on a dance floor,” Beatrice said.<
br />
  Dwight felt Earl’s fingers in the hair at the back of his head. He looked up. The gold tooth was gleaming bright, as if it were drawing the light from Earl’s heavy-lidded eyes. “Tell Lizzie it only hurt some at first, Dwight. It don’t hurt now.”

  chapter thirty-four

  HE SWUNG RIGHT ONTO Jefferson, nicking a red light and drawing an angry horn blast from the driver of a Hudson starting across the intersection. A shoe-heel moon, swollen on the horizon, stamped its image on the river and made a jagged charcoal line of the blacked-out cityscape on the Canadian side, where air-raid sirens rang out more frequently than in the U.S., in sympathy with compatriots in London. The wailing coming from the car that turned behind him might have belonged to yet another drill.

  He had no doubt Mrs. Winsted was responsible for the presence of armed detectives outside his apartment. He should have foreseen it. Aura Lee was a Southern name, there was something of the faded belle about her; it was a victory for her to have outlived her Yankee husband and drawn money from the Union for so many years, money that could have been spent on arms and provisions. She was no more loyal to the country of her birth than an Irish saboteur was to Great Britain. He had suspected for some time that she was a hoarder, but had banked his suspicions because the apartment was convenient to his activities and he hadn’t wanted to spoil his home base. It was a textbook example of what could go wrong when you placed tactics ahead of strategy.

  He took one hand off the wheel to spread open the copy of Life on the seat next to him, peeling aside Deanna Durbin’s smiling face to run a thumb along the bayonet’s smooth vane. It would find its next sheath in Aura Lee Winsted’s abdomen.

  The sensation would be as satisfying as closing his fingers around the wasted neck of that woman at Ypsi State, the brittle bones popping like hollow reeds.

  But first things first.

  The proximity to West Jefferson had been one of the points in favor of choosing the apartment. As one of the four best routes out of the city, it led straight as a bayonet through all the downriver communities, bang-bang-bang, like rooms in a railroad flat, and westward to the open gravel roads of farm country, where he had room to maneuver in case of enemy pursuit. The cover of night was a bonus.