Jitterbug (2 page)

“You were wounded?”

“Yes, ma’am, in the leg.”

“Such a terrible war.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He leaned down and propped the briefcase against the base of a pedestal table, shifting the handle to his other hand at the same time. Holding it behind his leg, he gave her the form, unbuttoned the flap of his left breast pocket, and uncapped his fountain pen one-handed.

She held the form close to her face, moving her lips as she read. Then she took the pen, spread the sheet on the table under a lamp with a fringed shade, and filled in the blanks, bracing herself with her left hand on the table, the bills pinned beneath the palm. She drew a horizontal line through her sevens.

While she was signing her name he stepped behind her, curled his left forearm across her throat, and pulled her back into an arch, all in one movement, like a cat springing onto a high shelf. He crossed the hand holding the bayonet to the left side of her abdomen and slit her diagonally from pelvis to clavicle.

She filled her lungs, but her mouth flooded with blood and the cry came out in a pink bubble. Her body shuddered and began to sag.

He lowered her gently, backpedaling to lay her on her back so she wouldn’t bleed onto the floor where he might walk.

“Trickle, trickle, trickle.”

He switched off the radio, used the end of the shawl to wipe the knob, then cleaned the ten-inch steel blade with the order form and wrapped the form around it, clean side out. He put bayonet and paper back in the briefcase and found the pen and capped it and returned it to his pocket, buttoning the flap. Then he went down the hall to rifle the bedroom for the hoard of ration stamps while Anna Levinski finished dying.

I
T’S PSYCHOLOGY
.”

“What’s psychology?”

“It’s the study of the mind.”

Canal rolled his eyes, so eminently made for rolling. Zagreb was convinced he never wore dark glasses because his eyeballs bugged out so far they’d touch the lenses. “I know what psychology is,” Canal said. “I’m asking how it applies to the present situation.”

They were standing near the third-floor landing in the California, a residential hotel on Hastings in Niggertown. A grubby plaque on the ground floor announced that Theodore Roosevelt had stopped there in 1907. It didn’t say he’d stayed. Zagreb was pretty sure the old Rough Rider had taken one look at the lobby and charged straight from there to the Pontchartrain. He didn’t believe any establishment could deteriorate this much in just thirty-six years. It had been at least that long since anyone had replaced the dead flies in the bowl fixtures.

“This pimp used to work for Big Nabob.” He tipped his head toward the door at the other end of the hall. “You can’t grill him in his own dump. That’d be like interrogating Dick Wakefield at Briggs Stadium.”

“Wakefield’s One-A, I heard.”

“Who gives a shit except Wakefield? You can see my point.”

“Sure. That’s why we take the pimp downtown.”

“That’s no good either. It’s like his second home. If you looked in the basement you’d find his handprints in the cement. You’ve got to see it from his point of view: Four big white guys bust down his door, cuff him hard and pull him out. He thinks he’s headed downtown, only when it’s time to turn right we go straight and then turn left. Drag him up to a little room in some stinking hole he’s never been in.”

“We don’t know that. Maybe he brings some quail here, bangs her every Saturday night in that same room.”

Zagreb lifted and settled his hat; letting the exasperation out. “The
point
is we aren’t playing by the rules. Not even the unwritten ones. So what
else
aren’t we doing? Up to now the worst he expects is we haul him down to the furnace room at Thirteen Hundred and strip him and bounce him around the coal bin. Could be we’re going to shove him out a window instead.”

“He won’t like that. Spooks are scared of heights.”

“You don’t want Eleanor Roosevelt to hear you talking like that.”

“Fuck her and fuck FDR. I’m voting for Dewey.”

“I thought all you Polacks registered Democrat.”

“I ain’t a Polack. I’m Ukrainian.”

“No kidding. My mother was born in Bulgaria.”

“Who gives a shit except your mother?” Canal grinned, rare event. “I get where you’re going, but it don’t make sense. If you want to grill a jig outside his backyard you don’t use a hotel room in jigtown. Why not take him up to Grosse Pointe?”

“Rent’s two hundred a month in Grosse Pointe. You want to feed that kitty?”

“I don’t know why we’re feeding this one. The department should pay.”

“The department doesn’t know about the California. If they found out they’d make us get rid of the room. Our conviction record takes a nosedive, the papers stop writing about us, the commissioner breaks up the squad like he’s been wanting to do ever since he got in, and the next thing you know you and I and McReary and Burke are freezing our peckers off walking Griswold in January.”

“That happens I join up. At least I’d get combat pay.”

“Not to mention a Kraut potato-masher in your shorts.”

They were two men in black suits and gray snap-brims standing in a stairwell stinking of stuffed cabbage and urine. Sergeant Starvo Canal—it had probably been
Kanal
until his father hit Ellis Island—took up most of the space. Zagreb, slighter and not as tall, had selected him for his size, and had been delighted to learn he had a cool head as well, not normally to be found in big men of his background. Canal had chronic blue chin, a squidgy little nose that looked ridiculous in the middle of his fleshy face, and those eyes. He could lift a good-size man six inches off the floor by the throat one-handed and turn an experienced defense attorney into a sputtering maniac during cross-examination. Canal and Zagreb took the same size hat, which when the lieutenant removed it to show his bulging forehead explained why some of the men at 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters, called him Donovan, after a radio show called
Donovan’s Brain.
His Christian name was Maximilian, but he refused to answer to Max. Canal, Burke, and McReary called him Zag. No one called him Lieutenant, except of course the people he was in the habit of placing under arrest. When he put his hat on he became invisible. Together he and Canal made up half the Detroit Racket Squad.

After a few more minutes Zagreb looked at his Wittnauer and said it was time to see how the other half was coming along. They went back and gave the knock.

McReary opened. He had freckles on his young bald head and an expressive mouth that sent all the wrong signals—like last week, when he’d smiled while reporting the death of Edsel Ford, a man he admired, as if it were Mussolini who’d died. Ford had once tipped him a hundred dollars for helping to arrange security at a party in Grosse Pointe.

“Anything?” the lieutenant asked.

The bald officer grinned and nodded. “Not a damn thing. We thought we’d wait for you before we got impolite.”

“Who’s Jekyll?”

“That’d be me.”

Zagreb and Canal went in. It was a narrow room with faded sunflowers on the paper above scarred wainscoting and a window looking out on the yellow brick wall of the secondhand clothing store next door. The squad had picked it for the view. There was a painted iron bedstead with the mattress rolled up against the headboard, exposing the springs, a table by the door where Burke and McReary had laid their service pieces, and two upright wooden chairs, both occupied. Burke, several years older than Sergeant Canal but still just an officer, sat astraddle with his beefy furred forearms folded across the back of his chair, facing a Negro in his fifties, sitting with his wrists cuffed behind him. The Negro was naked. His ribs showed and his chest was hollow, but he had a huge penis even when flaccid—one of the rare examples Zagreb had seen of that racial tall tale in practice. The wooden seat of the chair between the man’s spread thighs was soaked, not entirely with sweat. The rank ammonia stench had been detectable from the hall.

The newcomers squeaked their revolvers from their underarm holsters and placed them on the table before approaching the seated pair. The precaution was the lieutenant’s, inspired by the death of an officer in Ecorse in 1931 when a small-time bootlegger got hold of his piece during interrogation and shot him in the head.

“What’s the holdup?” Zagreb asked Burke.

The officer in the chair didn’t stir or take his eyes off the Negro. “Ask Mac. I wanted to toss the shine out the window but he said no.”

“There’s a war on. Rationing, you know? Before you go anywhere you have to ask yourself: Is this trip necessary?” McReary looked mournful over his little joke.

Canal swiveled his eyes, registering his opinion of McReary as Jekyll to Burke’s Hyde. Burke was large and soft and moonfaced and smiled when he was amused and scowled when he was upset. He cried when Kate Smith sang “God Bless America.” Burke inspired trust.

The naked man sat with his chin on his chest, staring at the floor. He’d vomited in his own lap; bits of green vegetable and what looked like bean sprouts had dried in his pubic hair. Chinese? Zagreb stood over him with his hands in his pockets.

“You’re a lucky man, Richard, bet you didn’t know that. You sold Sergeant Canal a brand-new set of Uniroyals, complete with spare. You’re not a licensed tire dealer, you’re not registered with the OPA. You didn’t ask for stamps. We could’ve turned you over to the feds. They hang black marketeers. Michigan hasn’t hanged anybody since eighteen thirty.”

“I’m a lucky man,” mumbled the Negro into his chest.

“Lucky as Andy Hardy. It just so happens the sergeant’s got a mad on for J. Edgar Hoover. Isn’t that right, Sergeant?”

“Fuck J. Edgar,” said Canal.

“The sergeant wanted to be a G-man. It’s all he ever wanted since he read in
Liberty
about how the feds got Dillinger. His application with his picture got all the way up to Hoover’s office. Hoover tossed it in the ashcan. What was it he said, Sergeant?”

“He said I looked like Eddie Cantor.”

“That’s what I meant when I said you were lucky, Richard. Turns out the sergeant’s a Jolson man. Sing ‘Swanee,’ Sergeant.”

“I left my pitch pipe in the apartment.”

“Too bad. You ought to hear him. Close your eyes, you swear it’s the radio. Now, McReary’s all for Cantor. He’d just as soon the feds put your neck in a rope. Burke’s tone-deaf, but he doesn’t like paperwork. That’s two for, one against.”

Now Richard lifted his head. One eye was swollen shut. His nose had bled and the blood had dried into a black crust on his lip, but he still didn’t look much like Hitler. “How about you?”

“I like Crosby.”

The naked man seemed to find that amusing. He snorted. His nose started bleeding again.

“Der Bingle for me,” Zagreb said. “So you can see I’m undecided. I know what I don’t want, though. I don’t want to see the feds hang you out at Fort Wayne and spoil our perfect record. Well, perfect since eighteen thirty. Where’d you get the tires?”

“Found ’em on Outer Drive. Somebody dumped ’em.”

“Why would anyone dump a brand-new set of tires when the governor’s driving on recaps?”

“Maybe he didn’t have no stamps neither.”

“Was it the Conductor?”

“I don’t know no conductors. My daddy was a porter on the B-and-O.”

Burke leaned back, hooked an ankle under the rung of Richard’s chair, and lifted the front legs off the floor. The Negro’s bare feet dangled.

“You’re not a stupid nigger, Richard,” Zagreb said. “You ran numbers for Big Nabob until he got capped. You still run whores for Frankie Orr. Doesn’t he let you call him the Conductor? You know why they call him that?”

Richard shook his head. Zagreb nodded at Burke, who straightened his leg with a snap. Richards chair went back and down with a bang. The glass shivered in the window frame. Somebody in the room below thumped at his ceiling with a broom handle.

The lieutenant stepped forward and stood astraddle the Negro where he had rolled off the chair onto the floor. Zagreb’s hands were out of his pockets and clenched at his sides. Instinctively Richard coiled himself into a fetal ball. The skin of his buttocks was loose and wrinkled.

“They call Frankie Orr the Conductor because he garroted another guinea to death in front of a carload of passengers on the Seventh Avenue El, just before Sal Borneo brought him out here from New York. But you knew that, Richard. Big Nabob knew it when Frankie shot him and took over his racket and you with it. Now he’s taken over the black market, and that’s where you got the tires you sold Sergeant Canal.”

“I don’t know no Frankies.”

Zagreb snatched up the fallen chair by one leg and swung it up over his head. The back struck the bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. The bulb exploded with a hollow plop. Richard coiled himself tighter, burying his head between his knees. The lieutenant hovered, then swung the chair back down and let it drop. It glanced off the naked man’s bent back. Richard took in his breath but made no other noise.

The thumping started up again from below.

Zagreb was exhausted suddenly. “Where do you live, Richard?”

“Sojourner Truth.”

“Jesus.” McReary grinned.

“Give him his clothes and take him home,” Zagreb said.

Canal goggled. “Money changed hands!”

Burke said, “What about Frankie?”

“You heard him. They never met.”

“He’s a lying nigger.”

“Any nigger who’d lie for two hours in room 309 of the California would lie his way onto the slab. I’ve been with the department since I got out of knickers. I haven’t killed anybody yet. I’m not going to do it over a fucking set of tires.”

Canal said, “We’ll put him in a cab. He ain’t stinking up the Olds.”

“Put him in a Zero if you want. Just get him the hell out.” The lieutenant fished in a pocket and came out with two zinc pennies and a streetcar token. “Who’s got a nickel?”

McReary had one. Canal followed Zagreb to the pay telephone at the end of the hall. The lieutenant called downtown, said “yeah” three times, wrote an address on a bare patch of wall, and hung up. “Hamtramck cops need a hand with a homicide on Dequindre.”