Jitterbug (18 page)

The man on Zagreb’s left was an unescorted shrimp in an unpressed gray suit ten years out of date. He wore a heavy ingot class ring, University of Detroit, and slicked his muddy brown hair back Valentino style from a Greek face, all nose and pink rounded knob of a chin. He caught the lieutenant looking and hoisted the water pitcher in front of him, lifting his eyebrows in a silent offer. When Zagreb shook his head, the man filled his own glass.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me these days,” the man said. “I’m drinking water the way I used to swill hootch. I guess all the fun went out of it after Repeal.”

Zagreb nodded, then decided comment was required. “It’s better for you, though. Water.”

“It’s overrated. Alexander and Genghis Khan conquered the known world on wine and fermented mare’s milk. They say Attila preferred to drink plain water from a wooden cup while his men guzzled wine from goblets, but that was politics. He died of a hemorrhage brought on by alcoholic poisoning.”

“Are you a historian?” He was mildly interested.

“Only by default. I was a newspaperman until the news I covered became history overnight. The Twenty-first Amendment put more people out of work than the Eighteenth. Connie Minor.” He set down his glass half-empty and held out his hand.

Zagreb took it. “I thought I recognized you. We met once, sort of. Max Zagreb.”

“I know. I’ve seen your picture in the paper. I don’t remember us meeting, though.”

“It was in the hallway outside the Ferguson-O’Hara grand-jury room. I was in uniform then. I testified right after you.”

“That was four years ago. I’m surprised you remembered.”

“You were a celebrity. Everybody in town read your column.”

“Everybody in the country read my column. I was syndicated in four hundred newspapers. Then liquor became legal, and I couldn’t get a job as copyboy. When I testified I hadn’t been inside a city room in six years.”

“What are you doing now?”

Minor grinned a bitter grin. “I write advertising copy for a hardware chain.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not if you like writing about chain saws.”

“I thought maybe you were covering the dinner.”

“I’ve still got a couple of friends in the business. One of them couldn’t make it. You ever chum around with hardware salesmen? A couple of conversations about Stanley hammers and you’d stick up an old lady for her ticket to some musty fund-raiser.”

“Still feel that way?”

“You have to have a reporter’s eye,” Minor said. “People are the only entertainment not affected by wartime shortages. I’d duck a ball game to watch Old Henry decomposing in public. What do you think, Lieutenant, does Harry Bennett still suck his eighty-year-old dick?”

Zagreb glanced toward the head table, at Ford sitting behind his untouched plate, staring out into the emptiness of the room above, the heads of the assembled guests, and bouncy, red-haired Bennett shadowboxing for the benefit of Mrs. Chrysler, who appeared to be listening politely to a story from his pugilistic past. Clara Ford broke off her conversation with Henry Kaiser to lift her knife and fork and cut up her husband’s breast of veal (four points per pound).

“I kind of didn’t hate him the one time we met,” Zagreb said. “He was talking about that silly-ass castle he built out by Ypsi, full of secret passages and lions and tigers in cages. He was like a kid with a wad of money.”

“Tell that to Reuther.”

“Reuther’s a Red.”

The waiters, wearing gold jackets and white cotton gloves, arrived with the meals for the table. Zagreb’s veal looked underdone. The peas were khaki-colored and came from a can.

Minor used his fork to separate the lumps from his mashed potatoes. “I’m glad I’m not rich. Can you imagine shelling out fifty bucks a plate for crap like this?”

“I guess some of them thought they were buying gas masks for the boys.”

“Most of them wouldn’t know what one was if they put it on their plate. If one of those boys showed up on their doorstep without a uniform they’d turn the dogs loose on him. The men are here to make deals and the women just want to get the prewar chiffon out of mothballs before someone kills Hitler.” Blackening his meal with pepper, he grinned again, this time sheepishly. “I’m kind of a Red myself.”

They ate for a few moments in silence. Minor gave up trying to make a dent in the veal, pushed his plate away, and refilled his glass from a fresh pitcher. “Well, take a long look at them,” he said. “That’s history up there in those cartoon shirt boards. Maybe the last time the men whose names hang outside their factories will all be gathered in one place. They hung motors on buckboards and drove them out of barns straight into the twentieth century, taking the country with them. Some of them still have grease under their nails. In five years their sons will be running things—business-school grads who think a screwdriver’s something you drink.”

“That was the idea, wasn’t it? Everybody wants something better for their kids.”

“Bullshit. If they didn’t have to die they wouldn’t bother having them.”

It was Zagreb’s turn to grin. “I can’t tell if you love them or hate them.”

“Neither can I. That’s what makes me so mad at the sons of bitches.” He sat back and rattled the ice in his glass. “You’re working the Kilroy case.” It wasn’t a question.

The lieutenant nodded and speared a pea.

“The papers say you’re putting the arm on Frankie Orr. Anything in it?”

“Orr runs the black market.”

“You really think this guy’s selling the ration stamps?”

“He’s not using them for himself. Nobody has that many friends. Not even Bob Hope.”

“Maybe he’s not doing anything with them.”

“Then why take them?”

“I don’t know. I gave up trying to think like killers a long time ago.”

“No good at it?”

“Too good at it. You never know where a thing like that will stop. But I think you’re barking down the wrong hole. This guy doesn’t give a shit about stamps or money. He’s in it for the boot.”

“Thrill killer?”

“He doesn’t know it himself. He might even have talked himself into believing he’s doing it all for a good cause. Jack the Ripper thought he was hosing all the filth out of the East End. You’re wasting your time with Frankie. He and Kilroy aren’t in the same league. Hell, they’re not even in the same sport.”

Zagreb slid his knife and fork into his plate and sat back. “Who have you been talking to?”

“How close did I come?”

“You’ve been doing a lot of thinking like a reporter for someone who claims he isn’t one anymore.”

“I’ve made my peace with that. In my day, reporters were the scum of the earth and we knew it. We rolled in it. I got my first job because I was small enough to crawl through a window and steal a picture of a murder victim off the mantel while my partner was talking to the widow on the porch. They’re still the scum of the earth, only now they cloak themselves in the dignity of a profession. When the Fourth Estate picks up as many hypocrites as the other three, it’s time for all of us to start selling bug-zappers and garden rakes. That doesn’t mean the instinct goes away. There were reporters before there were newspapers. Newspapers are just an excuse to ask questions no one wants to answer.”

“So this conversation is off the record.”

Minor’s mouth twisted. “Not at all. It’ll be the lead in the next issue of the
Paint-Mixers’ Gazette.
I thought all you dicks were good listeners.”

“We’ve got reason to believe Kilroy talks his way into his victims’ confidence by pretending to sell magazine subscriptions for the war effort. We’re pretty sure he wears some kind of uniform and poses as a veteran.”

“It makes sense. Jack Dance once put on a police uniform to kidnap one of Joey Machine’s lugs. What uniform?”

“We don’t know. He killed a dry cleaner, and there was a uniform missing from his inventory, the record didn’t say what kind. We figure the cleaner got suspicious.”

“Kind of thin. The country’s full of men in uniform.”

“We’ve got a request in to all the area installations for a list of personnel unaccounted for at the times of the murders.”

“You think he’s genuine?”

“Killing is soldiers’ work. Where better for a killer to hide than among killers?”

A waiter came with a tray of ice-cream cups and they stopped talking. Minor declined, explaining that sweets made him giddy. When the waiter left: “I like it better that he’s not genuine.”

“Why?” Zagreb sank a spoon into his vanilla.

“If he were a soldier, he’d have an outlet. There’s nothing like mowing down a line of Japs with a tommy gun if you like spilling blood. My guess is the uniform is more than just an icebreaker. He wears it because it makes him feel good.”

“When I was in uniform I couldn’t wait to get out.”

“You must’ve wanted it at some point or you wouldn’t have joined the department. How would you have felt if they turned you down?”

“I wouldn’t’ve gone around pretending I was a cop.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

He had some more ice cream without tasting it. “I could get back in touch with the military and ask who’s been rejected for service locally.”

“You might even get through the list before the war ended.”

“Well, since Pearl, say, and before the first killing.”

Minor hunched forward suddenly. He looked like Churchill. “Find out who left doing cartwheels and who got pissed and showed it. That’ll narrow the field tight.”

“How come you’re not a cop?” The lieutenant smiled.

“Too short. That’s how come I know how Kilroy felt. He started slaughtering old ladies. I bought a typewriter.”

Zagreb was still thinking about the list. “Flat feet, heart murmurs?”

“Psychiatric.”

“That information s confidential.”

“In theory. In peacetime. FDR’s run a jump-wire around the Bill of Rights. When was the last time you saw a copy of
Literary Digest
on a stand?”

“It folded.”

“It had subscribers and advertisers up the ass. It ran one too many editorials criticizing the administration and Roosevelt closed it down under the Alien and Sedition Act. Call in Hoover. He loves this kind of shit.”

“Jesus,” Zagreb said.

“There’s a war on, you know?” Connie Minor filled his glass from the water pitcher.

“W
HICH ONE,
P
ASQUALE
?”

Pasquale Garibaldi D’Annunzio Oro—“Patsy” to everyone but His father—stared hard from one of the bolts of fabric to the other, patiently cradled in the arms of two fresh-faced employees in the upstairs fitting room at Harry Sufferin’s. He had mixed feelings about the room. He liked its old-fashioned dark mahogany paneling, its framed prints of history’s most elegantly appointed gentlemen, its racks of suits in various stages of completion, each one bearing a tag identifying the customer, the clean smells of linen and worsted wool that permeated the walls to the studs. But he found the rows of adjustable male torsos on their iron stands disturbing. At twelve (most people thought he was younger, stunted as he was by the same Congenital weakness that allowed him to stand only with the aid of crutches), he knew a little about the underside of his father’s business, and the forms put him too much in mind of dismembered corpses.

However, he was more frightened of his father.

The thought of disappointing Frankie Orr by choosing the wrong suit fabric terrified him. He hesitated until even the two assistants started shifting their weight from foot to foot. Only the head tailor, exquisitely attired in lawn shirtsleeves, a roomy vest, suspended trousers, and glistening cordovan loafers with tassles, maintained his serenity in the presence of so much silence. The frames of his half glasses matched his beautiful head of silver hair and he wore his badge of office, a yellow tape measure, around his neck.

Finally the boy pointed at the gray chalkstripe. Immediately he sensed his father’s exasperation.

“What’s wrong with you? You want your old man to look like a gangster? Look at the gabardine. Feel it, for chrissake. That’s how Harry Hopkins dresses. You’d never mistake him for a gun punk. You want me in silk drawers and hand-painted ties like those animals in Chicago. I talk to you, sometimes I feel like going home and kicking your mother in the stomach. When can you fit me?”

The tailor slid a small leather-bound notebook from his vest—pocket and turned pages. “Wednesday afternoon?” He peered over the tops of his glasses.

“Tuesday. I’m going to L.A. end of this month. I need the suit by then.”

“I’ve got six fittings Tuesday.”

“You got one. Last time you squeezed me in I wound up with an armhole the size of my thumb. If I show up at that Jew cocksucker Benny Siegel’s looking like shit I’m coming back here and feeding you ten yards of gabardine and you can wash it down with battery acid. Let’s go, Pasquale.”

His father offered him no help with the stairs, tapping his hand-lasted shoe at the bottom and glancing at the heavy gold watch strapped to his wrist while Patsy gathered his crutches under one arm and leaned on the banister. He had spent much of his first eight years in examining rooms, and in his dissatisfaction with the results Frankie Orr had concluded the boy was too weak or lazy to use the legs God gave him. He called Patsy’s mother a mollycoddler and worse, and when the priest at Sacred Heart refused to grant an annulment had remodeled the house in Grosse Pointe, making the east and west wings self-contained so that the Orrs would never need to see each other except when public social occasions demanded a show of family solidarity. Patsy never knew from day to day in which wing he would sleep that night. He loved his mother while dreading those days when drink made her maudlin and incoherent. His father he feared.

The uninformed passerby might have taken the line of cars drawn up against the curb on Shelby to belong to an official from the War Department, or before the war to a Chrysler road test. The day after Pearl Harbor, suspecting that such luxuries would soon be scarce, Frankie had traded in his three black 1941 Lincoln Zephyrs on a trio of 1942 Airfoil DeSotos in identical maroon. Favoring the elongated profile of the new running board-less designs, and having developed a healthy job-oriented respect for such features as the Powermaster 115-horsepower engine and Fluid Drive Simpli-Matic transmission, he had passed up the Cadillac Sedan DeVille with its comic-book pontoon fenders and the fuel-stingy sluggishness of the Packard Clipper for the low-slung Fifth Avenue Custom town sedan.