Missing from the newsreel were a number of details that Zagreb himself would never repeat, lest he risk both his job and his draft-exempt status. Four colored men removed from the Woodward Avenue streetcar by eight patrolmen on the promise of safe passage, then turned over to a white mob and beaten to death. A colored boy, unidentified, stomped and pummeled by a gang of white men and boys in T-shirts until his brains leaked out his ears on the front steps of the Federal Building. An eyewitness reported on camera the stoning and beating death of Joseph Horatiis, a white doctor answering a call in the riot area, by Negroes who dragged him from his car. No footage went to the carloads of rednecks armed with rifles and shotguns, quartering the streets for colored game like drunken deer hunters.
It was no wonder, caught (like the Italians) between the rape of Detroit and the liberation of Europe, the fate of a five-time killer (perhaps six; sheriff’s deputies in Washtenaw County had identified a body found in a patch of woods near Willow Run as a girl last seen attending a movie with a man whose description closely matched Ziska’s), tracked down and shot by police when he refused to surrender, barely made the national wires, and then only one paragraph.
He left the theater before the final confrontation between the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s flattopped monster. It reminded him too much of his marriage. At Michigan, he was held up through two light changes by a procession of cars headed for Jefferson, part of a publicized memorial service on Belle Isle for the victims of the riots. It included rattletrap touring cars filled with armband-wearing members of Reverend White’s church and officials of Otis Saunders’ Double-V Committee, a Negro community group; Cadillacs and Lincolns containing the Junior League wives of automobile manufacturers; various motorists and passengers unknown, probably friends and family of the slain; Robert Leroy Parker Gitchfield’s unmistakable Auburn, Gidgy at the wheel showing more brotherly regard than Zagreb would have expected of the most notorious black marketeer in Paradise Valley—and wasn’t that Beatrice Blackwood, the Forest Club’s most popular barmaid, riding shotgun?—and a couple in a battered Model A, colored kid with a face that looked like it was still healing from the events of last month, and his pretty light-colored girlfriend, both dressed in black. Zagreb felt vaguely certain he’d met the young man recently.
It bothered him, not that it should have. He came into contact with so many people in the course of an investigation; nobody could expect him to remember them all. They didn’t all look alike to him. He prided himself on that.
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.
Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once The Oklahoma Punk was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.
Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s Motor City Blue, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel, Sugartown, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is Infernal Angels.
Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980, The High Rocks was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s The Book of Murdock. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author. Journey of the Dead, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.
Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.
Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.
Estleman and his family. From left to right: older brother, Charles; mother, Louise; father, Leauvett; and Loren.
Estleman and Deborah Morgan at their wedding in Springdale, Arkansas, on June 19, 1993.
Estleman with actor Barry Corbin at the Western Heritage Awards in Oklahoma City in 1998. The author won Outstanding Western Novel for his book Journey of the Dead.
Loren signing books at Eyecon in St. Louis in 1999. He was the guest of honor.
Estleman and his fellow panelists at Bouchercon in 2000. From left to right: Harper Barnes, John Lutz, Loren D. Estleman, Max Allan Collins, and Stuart M. Kaminsky.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, signing together while on a tour through Colorado in 2003.
Estleman with his grandson, Dylan Ray Brown, shown here writing an original story on “Papa’s” typewriter at Christmastime in 2005 in Springfield, Missouri.
Estleman with his granddaughter, Lydia Morgan Hopper, as he reads her a bedtime story on New Year’s Eve 2008. Books are among Lydia’s favorite things—and “Papa” is quick to encourage this.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, with the late Elmer Kelton and his wife, Anne Kelton, in 2008. Estleman is holding his Elmer Kelton Award from the German Association for the Study of the Western.
Estleman in front of the Gas City water tower, which he passed by on many a road trip. After titling one of his novels after the town, Estleman was invited for a visit by the mayor, and in February 2008 he was presented the key to the city.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1998 by Loren D. Estleman
cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4532-4862-1
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Dedication
Part one: Kilroy Was Here
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
/> Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Part two: Let Me Off Uptown
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Part three: Is This Trip Necessary?
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Part four: Lights Out
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Chapter thirty-four
Chapter thirty-five
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
Copyright
Jitterbug Page 26
