Jitterbug (12 page)

The music stopped in the middle of a phrase. There was a burring among the crowd. Dwight and Elizabeth separated, craned their necks, but from where they stood they could see neither the entrance nor the jukebox, whose plug had obviously been pulled. He wondered if it was an air-raid drill.

Somebody read his mind, because a deep male voice with gravel in it announced, “Simmer down, boys and girls. We ain’t Japs or Germans. We want all the women over here and all the men lined up there along the bar. Now.”

Robbery, thought Dwight; but as the crowd began to migrate in two directions he spotted the blue uniforms. Half a dozen policemen were in the room, holding their nightsticks in both hands across their thighs. All of them were white. The one with the words was a sergeant with thick sloping shoulders and a carpet of blue beard covering the lower half of his face, like a gangster in an editorial cartoon. Dwight saw his kind every day on the line: knob-knuckled Poles whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers had turned the iron-hard soil of tenant farms in the Balkans for generations. Their fathers had come over when Henry Ford started paying a dollar a day to build Model T’s in Dearborn, and when the plants were filled had fanned out to fill the positions nobody else wanted. Boxer. Garbageman. Cop.

“Dwight.”

He blinked at Elizabeth. He’d forgotten for a moment she was there. Her face was pale beneath the ginger. He smiled and put a hand against her upper arm, giving her a little push. “It’s all right.”

She stood her ground, but the swell had started. Bodies came between them and he turned toward the bar, where a ragged line of men in bright party clothes had begun to form. He looked for Earl but couldn’t find him.

“Come on, boys, come on. You-all can shuffle faster than that.” The big sergeant stood in the middle of the floor, bouncing the end of his stick against a square palm. He had a big purple vein on the left side of his forehead and a fat neck that rolled like an inner tube over the edge of his buttoned blue collar.

A younger officer, skinny as twine, with sad eyes, walked along the line of patrons, touching with his stick those who were facing him instead of the bar. “Hands on the bar! Lean!”

Dwight obeyed before he got to him. “What’s the trouble, Officer?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Shut up.”

Then came the frisk. A pair of officers working from opposite ends of the line patted down each man from armpits to ankles, not neglecting to pull back the cuffs of their jackets and run a finger around inside their collars and inspect the occasional hat. Whenever a switchblade or a revolver came to light, the owner was torn away from the bar and shoved stumbling into the arms of the officers by the door, who handcuffed him and took him out. Red lights throbbed against the door whenever it opened. Dwight guessed a van.

“Well, what have we here?”

Dwight risked a peek halfway down the bar. He recognized the bulbous end of the Hupmobile shifting cane sticking out of an officer’s fist. He couldn’t see Earl for the line of men leaning between.

“What’s the matter, Rastus, lose the rest of the car?”

“I take that out to keep folks from driving it off.” This was Earl’s voice.

The big sergeant closed the gap between himself and the bar in two strides, swinging his nightstick in a short underarm arc. There was a loud grunt, ending in a wet whimper, and Dwight saw the back of his brother’s oversize suit coat as he sank to his knees. The other officer, the one who had found the weapon, caught him by his collar and dragged his sagging body across to the group in uniform. The toes of Earl’s saddle shoes made black skid marks on the floor’s varnished surface. Dwight heard a woman’s cry from the other side of the room, quickly stifled. Either Elizabeth had caught herself or one of the other women had silenced her. The unspoken, rule was not to draw attention to oneself.

The officer working from the opposite end of the bar got to Dwight. He had never been frisked. The thoroughness of so swift an operation astonished and humiliated him. He felt that this stranger, whose breath stank of some deep corruption that reminded him of his mother, knew all his physical secrets. He knew his crotch was damp with perspiration and hoped it wouldn’t be mistaken for urine. His wallet was squeaked from his hip pocket, gone through, and thrust back. He’d heard bills crackle and was pretty sure the man had palmed some of his cash.

“That’s the lot,” someone told the sergeant; Death Breath, Dwight guessed.

“Stamps?”

“Not enough in the place to throw a barbecue.”

“Shit.”

“Close the joint?”

“What for, listening to white bands?” The sergeant raised his voice. “You niggers can relax now.”

There was movement along the bar. Dwight turned around. While he was being frisked, four more white men had entered the room, all in civilian suits. Two were big, one of them bigger than the sergeant, with scary eyes, bulged like in a cartoon. Dwight, who had an instinct about such things, looked to the smaller pair for the leader. One looked too young even to be a policeman. He decided on the other one, and congratulated himself when the Polack sergeant went up to him to report. He walked that way.

“Where you headed, skate?” murmured one of the men at the bar. “That there’s the Four Horsemen.”

“Yeah? Where their horses?”

He had never heard of the Four Horsemen. All he saw was a group of white men in cheap suits a size too large in the coats to make room for their underarm rigs and gray felt fedoras too shaggy for summer. The one the big sergeant was talking to didn’t appear to be listening; his tired gaze roamed the room restlessly and he had his hat pushed back to keep the smoke from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth from parking itself under the brim. He had a large brainy-looking forehead. The tired gaze lighted on Dwight. He jerked his chin in that direction. Turning, the sergeant spotted the colored man approaching and stuck out his stick. Dwight almost ran into it. “That’s as far as you come, Rastus.”

“My name’s Dwight.”

The sergeant’s neck swelled. Instinctively Dwight changed his tone.

“I don’t want no trouble, boss. I just want to axe about my brother. The one in the zoot suit?”

“Call Mr. Keen.” The sergeant had a mean grin, all bottom teeth with black between them. “Tracer of Lost Persons, you know? Your mammy hear you on the rah-dio.”

“Which zoot?” asked the man with the forehead. “All you boys dress like circus wagons.”

“He had him a Hupmobile stick in his pants. Your men done took him.”

“Concealed weapon, Lieutenant.”

“My old man had a Hup,” said the lieutenant. “That’s an uncomfortable thing to carry around.”

Dwight said, “He lives at Sojourner Truth.”

The lieutenant dropped his cigarette and ground it out. “Got a job, has he?”

“Willow Run. Me, too. Today’s his wedding anniversary,” he lied.

“You’ll have to give him his present at the jail.”

“Can I bail him out?”

“That’s up to the judge. You’ll have to wait till he’s arraigned.”

“Can I ask what’s this about?”

“Curious nigger, ain’t you?” The sergeant was grinning still, but there was danger in it now.

“We’re looking for ration stamps. Lots of ration stamps. You read the papers?”

“No, just magazines.”

“We’re looking for a killer. He kills old people for their ration stamps.”

“He colored?”

“Tonight’s the coloreds’ turn. Last night it was the wops. Tomorrow it’ll be the Polacks, or maybe the Belgians. We ought to have this one wrapped up in twenty-three days. That’s how many groups we got in this town. Any more questions?” He thumped the bottom of a pack of Chesterfields and speared one between his lips.

“Hits ’em over the head, do he?”

“Guts ’em like a perch, why?”

“It ain’t Earl. All he gots is that Hupmobile stick.”

“The law discourages that, too.” The lieutenant thumbed the wheel of a Ronson, tilted his head to bring the end of the cigarette to the flame. That okay with you?” He blew a plume, snapped shut the lighter. When Dwight said nothing he nodded. “Good. On account of we wouldn’t want to do anything that didn’t meet with your approval.”

Dwight thanked the cream-colored fuck for the information and went to find Elizabeth.

T
HE TURNKEY
D
WIGHT SPOKE
to in Visitors, a Wayne County sheriff’s deputy with wire-rimmed glasses and wisps of colorless hair like corn silk combed across his scalp, ran a finger down a list of names on a clipboard suspended by a string from a nail in the wall and told him he didn’t have any Earl Littlejohn in the population.

“What’s that mean, he ain’t here?”

“What it means.”

“
Was
he here?”

The turnkey looked at him, opened the top drawer of his gray steel desk, still looking at him, slapped a folder bound in shabby mahogany-colored cloth onto the desk, and snapped it open. He turned a page, moving his lips as he read, then closed the folder and returned it to the drawer and punched it shut. “Somebody came and got him last shift.”

“What, bailed him out?”

“Somebody from downtown. I can’t make out the signature.”

“What’s downtown?”

The turnkey sighed. “Police headquarters.” When Dwight didn’t react he said, “Thirteen hundred Beaubien. Want me to draw you a map?”

“I don’t live in town.”

The man sighed again and gave him directions. Dwight stopped listening after two turns. The damn city was laid out like a wheel downtown, but whoever had designed it had lost interest after a few blocks and changed it to a grid. Police headquarters seemed to stand somewhere in the no-man’s-land between. He went out and asked the first colored person he saw, an old baldy with a white moustache, dressed in overalls and sweeping a concrete stoop belonging to the building next door. The man said, “Hell, boy, you’re standing smack-dab in front of it.”

Dwight looked up at the city block of granite with arched windows marching the length of the ground floor. The weasel in the jail had wanted to get him lost.

“Where can I find the Four Horsemen?”

The old man scratched a clump of white whiskers under his chin. “Well, war’s all around. You don’t gots to go far to find famine, nor pestilence neither, comes to that. I ain’t seen Jesus.”

Dwight thanked him for the information he could use and walked around to the front of the building, which was all stairs to the entrance. He had on Earl’s old suit and one of his brother’s more conservative ties, gray-and-black rayon with a musical clef printed on it. Even with the belt buckled just under his sternum the pants were too long and he’d had to turn up the cuffs, which Elizabeth had insisted upon ironing so they’d look natural. He’d slept on the old couch in their living room after staying up late saying soothing things when she expressed her fears about Earl in police custody; fears he shared without admitting it. The key to the Model A had gone with Earl, and Dwight had had to call two cab companies before he found a driver who would accept a fare to Sojourner Truth. He’d risen after just two hours’ sleep to catch the bus downtown, only to find his sister-in-law already up and in the kitchen cooking him breakfast. He hoped Earl appreciated her. He couldn’t remember a morning in Eufala that didn’t find their mother still in bed while Dwight and Earl made coffee, often using yesterday’s grounds because she was too sick to visit the market. It had been this way even when their father was still around, his nights out tending to crowd noon of the next day.

It made Dwight’s cheeks burn to ask again for the Four Horsemen, but the sergeant behind the front counter, who looked like Churchill, didn’t blink. “Fifth floor, Racket Squad.” He jerked a nicotine-stained thumb in the direction of the elevators.

Dwight vaguely remembered hearing that Detroit Police Headquarters was designed by the same man who had laid out the Willow Run plant, but he couldn’t see much of a family resemblance between that utilitarian barn and the corridor where he stood waiting for an elevator to come get him. The marble floor needed mopping and wax and there were gum wrappers and cigar bands swept up like drift snow against the golden-oak wainscoting, but even the casual squalor of the police couldn’t cloud the Roman Empire authoritarianism of the architect’s vision. He was aware of the dirt under his nails and the fact that his shoes needed polishing. He suspected it was part of the plan that he felt like a flea in a cathedral.

By the time the brass doors shuttled open he had been joined by two officers in uniform, both over six feet and two hundred pounds. They took up most of the car, the stench of their cheap aftershave lotion was inebriating. He was relieved when they got out on the third floor, without ever having given any indication that they knew they weren’t alone. Dwight felt invisible now, and decided that was an improvement.

Another marble-and-wainscoted corridor greeted him on five, lined with oaken doors with frosted-glass panels, one of which bore gold letters spelling out
RACKET SQUAD.
He opened it against the pressure of a pneumatic closer and let it sigh shut behind him. The room beyond wasn’t much larger than an ordinary office, with a portion sacrificed besides for a corner cubicle whose walls fell four feet short of the ceiling. The linoleum floor was none too clean, littered with the inevitable scraps of paper and scarred with orange cigarette burns. The windows were heavily gridded, filmed with tobacco smut, and under the buzzing fluorescents stood too many desks, each with its swivel captain’s chair, uncomfortable-looking ladderback for visitors and suspects, and typewriter table bearing a machine with visible belts and gears, unreplaced since before Armistice Day.

At one of the machines sat a bald man in shirtsleeves, chattering away impressively with all his fingers. He didn’t look up until the bell rang, at which point Dwight was startled when he recognized the youngest of the four detectives who had entered the Forest Club the previous night. Without a hat on the man had just a brief fringe of red hair and looked much older. He had freckles on his scalp.

The man looked at Dwight with no recognition. He picked up a smoldering cigarette from an old burn groove on the edge of his desk, took a drag, replaced it in its groove, and sat back. The fan on his desk, battered stainless steel with a cast-iron base, gnawed at the smoke, but hadn’t the power to shred it, much less stir the stagnant air in the room. “Help you?”