Jitterbug (3 page)

“That’s Brandon’s detail.”

“Killer walked off with the deceased’s ration stamps. Could be black market.”

“Four-F shirking bastards.”

“Half of Hamtramck’s stationed in England. We’re all in this together, right?” He tapped a Chesterfield out of his pack.

“So they say.” Canal watched him light up. “That was some Hyde in there.”

Zagreb snapped shut the Zippo. “I used to be Jekyll.”

T
HE DEPARTMENT HAD ISSUED
them a 1941 Oldsmobile sedan, black, with a two-way radio and blackout headlights. Burke, the snazziest dresser inside a detective’s budget, with a charge account at Hudson’s and eight payments to go on his walnut console Philco radio-phonograph, thought the car looked like a carpet beetle. He’d refused to ride in it at first, but cabs were getting scarce and he’d relented finally, although not without making an acid comment every time he put a foot on the running board. When the squad was created in 1939 they had been promised a new unit every year. Then Pearl Harbor came along, GM, Dodge, Ford, Chrysler, DeSoto, and the others switched to tanks and bombers, and Baldy McReary added regular tours of all the junkyards in southeastern Michigan and Greater Toledo to his job description. So far he had managed to scrounge a transmission, steering column, AM radio, and the entire rear end of a 1940 model, all of which he stashed in a barn in Oakland County, dividing the storage fee with the others, against the inevitable breakdown. The farmer who owned the barn had threatened once to donate the contents to the government scrap drive if they failed to pay up the first of every month, but after a visit from Canal he had reconsidered and granted them a two-week grace period.

The cop on the scene in Hamtramck was a skinny albino named Walters. He wore a seersucker suit that hung on him like a sail and a half-inch coat of Noxzema on his white face to protect him from the June sun. Pinkwater eyes swam behind eyeglass lenses as thick as ashtrays. His obvious Adam’s apple went up and down like a piston when he read Zagreb’s ID.

“The Four Horsemen! I was beginning to think you guys were invented by George Stark.”

Stark was a columnist with the
Detroit News.

“Not hardly.”

“I hear you keep those Four-F assholes in line down at the beergardens. Bust their heads and throw ’em out in the alley with the swizzle sticks.”

Canal said, “Jesus H. Christ,” and turned his back to enjoy the view of the identical house across the street.

“We’re not supposed to bust them,” Zagreb said. “Just lump them up so they remember us every time they put on a hat.”

“Long as I don’t have to take part. They pulled me off Records for this detail. The regular guy’s in the Pacific. I’m a librarian.”

“No kidding. You want to check out the stacks for a stiff? They told us you had one here.”

Walters pulled the chain on his vacant smile and stepped aside from the doorway. Zagreb and Canal entered, followed by Burke and McReary, who with a hat covering his bald head looked like a kid from the reserve.

The living room was gray, not much wider than a hallway, and lit only by a single lamp and stuttering flashes from the Speed Graphic in the hands of a Detroit police photographer. Zagreb knew him slightly, a pudgy youngster with a cold cigar stub screwed permanently into the middle of his face and always the same baggy suit belted just under his sternum. He started basic training at the end of the month. Henry Brandon, inspector with Detroit Homicide, moved with him, shuttling backward and from side to side in a crouch like a fight referee, pointing out new angles. He ran toward lightweight gray double-breasteds, a white Panama hat between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and gold-rimmed spectacles. His temples were prematurely white.

The rest of the room belonged to a middle-aged woman with a face straight out of a newsreel from the Warsaw Ghetto, round, puffy, and dough-colored. Someone had cut her open like a deer and stretched her out on her back on the rug, a fern-leaf pattern with fringes. The eighteen-inch slash had begun to draw flies.

Brandon spotted Zagreb and stepped over the body to join him.

“Thought you’d be called up by now,” he said by way of greeting. “All of Stationary Traffic shipped out last week. Uniform’s up to its ass in ugly meter maids.”

“Essential duty,” Zagreb said. Brandon was too close to Commissioner Witherspoon for him to like. “I hear there are stamps missing.”

“The husband says whoever did it took every ration book in he house. He won’t say how many. Hoarders. Nothing else was stolen, he says. They had forty-six bucks in cash in a cigar box in the bedroom dresser, right where they kept the stamps. They still have. So whoever did it’s looking for a black market sale. Thought you might want a look.”

“Where’s the husband?”

“In the bedroom, bawling his head off. Polack, works at Dodge Main. I don’t think he did it. It’s a deep wound. There’s a carving knife in the kitchen, but it’s clean.”

“Forced entry?”

Brandon shook his head. “Way it looks, he grabbed her from behind and cut her backhanded. She trusted him enough to turn her back on him.”

“But it wasn’t the husband.”

“He’s got fists like sides of beef. He wouldn’t have to cut her. Anyway, she’s been dead a couple of hours. He called us as soon as he got home from work. You can go back and talk to him if you like.”

“Take a look first. Okay?”

“Be my guest.”

He didn’t bother looking at the wound. There were no slashes on her palms, just a purple stain at the base of the third and fourth fingers on the right one. He sniffed at it. “Ink,” he said. “Find a pen?”

“No. But we haven’t moved the body yet. Coroner’s late.” Brandon fitted a Lucky into a black onyx holder and lit it off a gold-and-enamel lighter. He didn’t look the least bit like Roosevelt.

Zagreb finished with the body. His gaze alighted on a pedestal table. He lifted the fringed shade off the lamp that stood on it and tilted the lamp. The glare of the bulb showed a pattern of indentations on the table’s varnished top. “She used this to write on. Can you get it?” He looked at the photographer.

The photographer squinted. He had the best eye downtown. The army would probably make him a cook. “Sure.” He snapped off a dozen shots from every angle, catching the spent bulbs and replacing them on the fly. Zagreb turned the lamp this way and that on the young man’s command. When he stopped to crank in a fresh roll of film, the lieutenant set the lamp on the floor and fished out one of the folded sheets of newsprint he used to take notes.

“Anybody got a pencil? No, a pencil.”

Brandon, who had produced a fountain pen, returned it to his double-breasted, patted his pockets, and shook his head. He looked at Walters. The Hamtramck cop took inventory and came up with a gnawed yellow stump, sharpened with a penknife. Zagreb took it. He smoothed out the sheet on the table and scrubbed the side of the lead back and forth across the page.

“Look at Charlie Chan,” said Brandon.

Zagreb held it up and squinted, then handed it to McReary, who had the best eyesight on the squad. The bald officer squatted on his haunches to look at it in the light of the lamp on the floor.

“Looks like she signed something,” he said. “A signature, anyway. Did some printing too. Numbers. What’s the address here?”

“Twenty-six ten Dequindre,” said Walters.

“Yeah. There’s an H and an A and maybe M.”

“Hamtramck.”

Everyone turned to stare at Burke, who looked away and didn’t contribute anything more.

“And O-S-T,” McReary said.

“OST?” Zagreb looked at Walters, who touched the Noxzema on his cheek.

“Well, there’s Botsford Street. But that’s a mile north.”

“That’s OTS. See anything else?”

“Not that I can read.” McReary stood.

“How soon can we have those shots?” Zagreb asked the photographer.

“Tomorrow night. I’m still processing the stuff from the Brzezicki shooting.”

“Tomorrow morning’s fine.”

Brandon said, “Hold on. We’ve been working the Brzezicki twenty-four hours.”

“Wartime priority,” Zagreb said. “You made the call. You can have this one if you want.”

The inspector said nothing.

Zagreb said, “Let’s get a look at the husband.”

The bedroom was a coffin, two-thirds the size of the living room and dominated by an antique bed with a six-foot walnut headboard. Joseph Levinski was sitting on the edge of the mattress with his big feet on the floor in their steel-toed brogans and his big shaggy head sunk between his shoulders as if to deflect blows. His face was red and gullied where tears had furrowed through the grime. He was still holding his black lunch pail on his lap. Zagreb guessed: liverwurst, an apple, maybe a Baby Ruth for after, milk in the Thermos. In November it would be chicken noodle soup. A pair of officers in the uniform of the Hamtramck Police Department, Polacks both from the look of them—ox-eyed, slate-jawed, arms bent at the elbows even in repose, the tendons shortened by generations of heavy lifting—took up the space not occupied by the bed and a new-looking chest of drawers in contrasting colors of wood. They looked relieved by the fresh company.

Levinski didn’t look up. He breathed noisily, snuffling up snot and exhaling through his mouth. The lieutenant stood in front of him with his hands in his pockets. “He found her?”

Brandon nodded. He was the only one who had gone in with Zagreb. There wasn’t room for another occupant. “Walters says the sergeant who took the call spent five minutes getting him calm enough to give the address. Half of it was in Polish. Which in this town is no big problem.”

Zagreb went to the chest of drawers. The top drawer hung open. “Print boys been in?”

“On the way. Everything takes longer now.”

He peeled back a stack of sleeveless undershirts and looked at an R.G. Dunn box in the corner of the drawer. He was still holding the pencil Walters had given him. He used the eraser end to tip up the pasteboard lid. Inside was a pile of wrinkled bills and a scattering of change. “This where they kept the ration books?”

“According to Levinski.”

The lieutenant looked again at the man on the bed, inventorying him along with the rest of the room. “Any domestic calls, complaints?”

“Walters says no.”

“I won’t get anything out of him the locals haven’t.”

Brandon sucked hard on the onyx holder, coaxing all the good out of his cigarette. A recent memo from Commissioner Witherspoon had urged all upper-level department brass to cut down on smoking by way of setting an example, freeing up cartons for America’s fighting men. Zagreb hadn’t seen a butt longer than a quarter of an inch in an ashtray downtown since before the memo.

“There’s a reader on my desk from the cops in Flatrock,” the inspector said. “They pulled a fifty-eight-year-old man out of the river three days ago, cut up just like the Levinski woman. Local character, carried a fat wallet stuffed tight with stamps and no one ever saw him spend one. The wallet wasn’t on the corpse.”

Zagreb felt his face getting haggard. “Shit. One of those.”

“I’ll send over the paperwork.”

“How come you’re so good to me?”

“Save it for show-up, Lieutenant. I got no shortage of homicides. There’s no need to ration those. Most of my best men are in England. It isn’t as if we aren’t all in the same boat.”

Zagreb lit up a Chesterfield by way of reply. The memo didn’t cover lieutenants.

Back in the living room, Walters was looking out the window into the window of the house next door. Except for the corpse at his feet there wasn’t a compelling difference between the room he was standing in and the one he was staring at. He turned around when Zagreb asked him about the neighbors.

“I’ve got uniforms out knocking on doors. Don’t get your hopes up. All the housewives are catching rivets over at Rouge.”

Zagreb gave him a card. “Ring me up if you turn anything.”

“I sure will. The Four Horsemen.” He was looking at the card as if that was what was printed there.

Out on the sidewalk, Zagreb told the others about Flatrock.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Canal said. “One of those.”

“That’s what I said.”

Burke, standing at the end of the walk, motioned to the rest of the squad. They joined him just as the coroner’s wagon, a green Chrysler panel truck, pulled into the driveway. Burke pointed at a smeary chalk drawing on the yellowed concrete between his wing tips: a crude cartoon showing a pair of goggle eyes and a long nose and two sets of sausage-shaped fingers overlapping a horizontal line, like someone peering over the edge of a fence. Underneath someone had printed KILROY WAS HERE.

“Anything?” Burke asked.

“What if it is? They’re all over town.” The lieutenant dropped his cigarette and crushed it out on Kilroy’s face.

And now the killer had a name.

S
ID
Y
EGEROV HAD OWNED
and operated Empire Cleaners on Twelfth Street for thirty-seven years. Before that he had apprenticed to his Uncle Yuri for six. Yuri, one-eyed and bent over—family legend said the eye had been put out by Cossacks and his spine damaged when imperial cavalry trampled him during a Marxist demonstration in St. Petersburg—was Sid’s godfather. He had traveled by train to meet his nephew in Battery Park after the doctors at Ellis Island had pronounced the young man fit enough to set foot on U.S. shores. Sid remembered the occasion as the first and last time Yuri had addressed him by name. After that the old man had developed an elaborate vocabulary of grunts whose tone and timbre indicated whether his apprentice was in disfavor or merely that his assistance was needed at the counter.

In 1906 the old man died, leaving the business to Sid, then twenty-three. The new owner knocked a hole in the front wall, installed a plate-glass window to let light into what had been a gloomy cave stinking of mildew and candle wax, replaced the Hebrew sign with the stores name lettered in English on the glass, and bought a new steam presser, retiring the one that had been in use since 1889. At that time he also acquired a wife, Chanah, whose photographic portrait, smoky at the edges and tinted with oils according to the custom of the age, still stood on his bedside table at home with black lace around the frame, although she had been dead eighteen years. She had been standing near the window, examining a customers cotton blouse by natural light to determine whether it had been damaged by bleach, when the glass exploded. The police determined that the bomb had been made by filling a smudge pot stolen from a street construction project with paraffin and inserting a flaming rag. The entire front of the store was gutted by fire and Chanah was hospitalized with third-degree burns over eighty percent of her body. She died that night—fortunately, they said, without regaining consciousness.