Jitterbug (27 page)

The music was too loud for conversation. When their drinks came they lifted their glasses, making up their own toasts in their heads, and drank. It amused Dwight that Elizabeth could not resist eating her cherry first. Most women, the ones he had observed anyhow, saved theirs for last if they ate them at all. In some things, he decided, she would always be a girl of fifteen.

The nightclub was filling rapidly. Dotted with ferns and dwarf palms in clay pots, its ceiling an aviary of papier-mâché parrots and its adobe-textured walls covered with bullfight posters and lattices strung with flowering vines, it looked as if it had been dug up by the roots in downtown Rio de Janeiro, or what someone who had never been closer to Rio than a Cesar Romero movie at the Capitol thought it might look like, and replanted square in the middle of the Rust Belt. At any moment Dwight expected a fat
generalissimo
to waddle in on the arm of a blond American starlet.

Earl leaned over and yelled in Dwight’s ear, “Makes you want to run down to Mexico, don’t it?”

“South America,” Dwight said.

Grinning, his brother nodded and sat back. He hadn’t heard a syllable.

A cigarette girl drifted by, wearing fruit on her head and a dress that showed she hadn’t any stretch marks. Earl caught her attention, laid a dollar bill on her tray, took a box of Parliaments, and refused change. She beamed her thanks and cruised on. Earl offered the box to Elizabeth. She took one. He lit it and one for himself off a table lighter shaped like a pineapple. Dwight wondered when his brother had switched from Luckies. They saw each other almost every day and he was conscious that they were losing touch.

He was conscious, too, never had his mind off it for long, that he hadn’t held up his end of the bargain with Lieutenant Zagreb. He’d had every intention, after bringing Earl home from the record store on Erskine, of reporting to the lieutenant that Gidgy was his brother’s link with the black market; he’d even thumbed a nickel into the slot of a pay telephone a block from Sojourner Truth and dialed two digits from the card Zagreb had given him. Then he’d hung up. There was something about Gidgy’s eyes, or rather the absence of them in that long solemn face behind the smoked glasses, that told him he had more to fear from him than he did from the police.

It had taken him the better part of forty-eight hours, on four hours’ sleep, to convince himself he wasn’t a coward, that he wasn’t afraid for himself. There was Beatrice, who had directed him to Gidgy in the first place, and who would certainly be caught up in repercussions if the Racket Squad raided Abyssinia Records and Sheet Music. There was Earl. And in all cases there was Elizabeth.

He’d been thinking a lot about her since Beatrice had asked him who he wanted to find Earl for, himself or his sister-in-law. Shit, who was he kidding, he’d been thinking about her a long time. It took a near stranger to tell him why.

He watched her now, smoking her cigarette like a grown-up lady, moving her shoulders to the clickety beat from the bandstand, leaning over to hear something Earl was saying, then tipping back her head and laughing, showing a horseshoe of perfect teeth and the long smooth line of her throat. She caught him looking and winked, then turned her head to look at the band. The wink warmed him as if he were standing up to his neck in the Gulf off Mobile.

Beatrice Blackwood was a smart woman.

The rousing tune ended on a sting of brass. The crowd clapped and hooted, and Cugat went immediately into “My Shawl,” a romantic ballad with the drums and Bolivian scratches shunted into the background. Earl stood, a little unsteadily, burlesqued a bow from the waist, and gripped the back of Elizabeth’s chair. She shot a concerned glance at Dwight, who smiled back and lifted his glass in a gesture of blessing. She rose and accompanied Earl to the dance floor.

The waiter came by. Dwight ordered another round, asking for the bartender to go a little more heavily on the soda and lighter on the whiskey, and paid for it. The waiter withdrew without a word or even a nod. Dwight reminded himself that that would have passed for hospitality unprecedented in Eufala. He was thinking too much of Alabama lately. He’d spent most of his nineteen years wishing he were anyplace else.

The drinks arrived just as Earl and Elizabeth returned, Earl apologizing for his two left feet, Elizabeth telling him to stop, he was just fine. Dwight noticed a faint limp as she headed down the corridor to the ladies’ room.

“Next slow one’s yours, little brother.” Earl plunked himself down and drank. “I should of waited for a jitterbug.”

“You’d wait a long time with Cugat.”

He made a face over his glass. “Starting to water down the booze. Your idea?”

“It’s early yet.”

“Dwight, you’re gonna make somebody a great wife.”

The band threw itself into “South of the Border,” sealing off conversation; which Dwight thought was just as well.

Elizabeth returned, smiled thanks at Dwight for her fresh Coke, and ate her cherry. They listened to the music, and then she and Dwight danced to “Cielito Lindo.” She’d freshened her scent in the ladies’ room. He knew she couldn’t afford any but the most common kind, yet he’d never smelled anything quite like it on any other woman. He decided she had a natural musk that changed it and made it exclusively hers.

“What you going to study?”

He started. “What?”

When she smiled with her lips closed she looked just like Lena Horne. “You said you was putting money aside to go to school. What kind of classes?”

“Mechanics.”

“I thought you didn’t want to work with your hands.”

“Not forever. I want to own my own garage, pay other people to work with their hands for me. But that don’t figure to happen right away. Even Henry Ford didn’t start out in a white shirt.”

“No, He just started out white.”

He looked at her.

“I don’t mean to shoot you down,” she said. “It’s just all anyone in this town ever talks about is Henry Ford, Henry Ford, Henry Ford, like he’s God. All he done was build himself up from flat ground. When you’re colored, you start in a hole.”

He thought about that. “At least I ain’t digging it any deeper since I come up here. That’s a step in the right direction.”

“I love you, Dwight.” She laid her head on his shoulder. “You’re the best brother.”

When they got back to the table, Earl had ordered another round. His glass was already half-empty.

“Let’s go to the Casanova,” he said. “This spick music’s giving me the Tijuana trots.” His speech was slurring.

Dwight said, “I’m hitting the head. Then I think we better go home.”

“Whassamatter, you don’t wanna miss
Lum and Abner
?”

Dwight went down the corridor. His bladder was close to bursting.

There was a short wait for a urinal. When one opened up he stepped toward it. The man standing next to it turned away, zipped up, and put a hand against Dwight s chest. “That one’s busted, boy.”

He looked up into the man’s beefy, flushed face. He wore his hair long and greasy to his collar and he had an old triangular scar on his left cheek that might have been made by someone’s ring. He smelled as if he’d been soaking in a tubful of beer.

Dwight said, “It ain’t busted. I just seen somebody using it.”

“You like looking at white men’s peckers?”

Dwight backed away from the man’s hand and walked around him. When a hand grabbed his shoulder and started to turn him he turned into it and swung his right fist up from the floor. He felt the jolt all the way to his shoulder when he connected with flesh and bone. Something struck him from behind then, a sharp blow to a kidney, and his bladder let go. When he turned that direction, a black light burst in his head. He tried to stay on his feet, but someone pushed him and someone else tripped him and he felt himself going down, with things striking him from all sides. He tried to get up, but a blow to the back of his neck flattened him. He was being kicked now. He curled himself into a tight ball. The harsh lemony disinfectant on the floor and the stench of his own urine burned his nostrils. His ears roared. Kicking and kicking, grunts behind the kicking. Something gave way with a snap and more kicking. The door swung open, drifted shut slowly against a percussive wave of frantic Latin music from the stage, clacking castanets and brumping brass, maracas rattling like shattered bones. He was wading in black water, he kept losing the bottom and ducking under. The burning in his nostrils increased, as if they were filling with water, but he knew it was blood. For a while he tried to stay above the surface. Then he gave up and let himself go. No one could hit you when you were underwater.

He awoke in the ambulance, the siren screaming in his ears, but the shock of the pain and the rhythm of movement made him dip back under. The pain woke him again when they were rolling him up a ramp, and again when he was being washed. He was aware of being bumped through a pair of swinging doors, of a sharp wave sweeping the length of his body as he was lifted from gurney to bed, details that afterward he wasn’t sure he hadn’t dreamt. He came to full consciousness aching all over and hearing Earl’s voice, close but muffled behind a gauze curtain hung from rings on the portable rail surrounding the bed: “I don’t see why we can’t take him home, if nothings busted.”

“Listen to the doctor, hon.” This was Elizabeth.

“He has two cracked ribs and a concussion.” This was a new voice: male, white, tired. “Closed head injuries are tricky. I’ve seen men sustain beatings far less severe, go to bed with nothing more than a slight headache, sometimes not even that, and in the morning they’re dead. We need to hold him overnight.”

“Sure you ain’t just trying to up the ante? Ford don’t cover this.”

“Earl! I’m sorry, Doctor. He’s drunk.”

“This is Detroit General. We don’t have to fill beds on a Saturday night. Your brother’s the eleventh brawl victim brought in here since I came on at eight. I’m told that’s some kind of a record since they repealed Prohibition. All but two of them were colored.”

“What’s going on?” Elizabeth asked.

“I don’t know. The other night I heard Edward R. Murrow saying the London Home Guard has Airedales that whimper when they hear enemy bombers approaching—gives them an extra second or two to activate the air-raid sirens. After a few months in the emergency room you get to be like one of those dogs. All the time I was getting ready for my shift I had a feeling this was going to be a long weekend.”

M
AX
Z
AGREB WAS FEELING
more like the youngest lieutenant in the Detroit Police Department than he had for some time.

The sea of uniforms that greeted him when he entered the briefing room represented the largest assembly of street patrolmen gathered at 1300 since war was declared. The median age was forty-five. The youngest reserve on hand was almost forty, and there was at least one sixty-year-old in attendance who had been called out of retirement to free a desk cop to fill a vacancy left on foot patrol by an officer currently serving with Halsey. The sheer number of gray heads made Zagreb feel positively adolescent. It both amused and alarmed him to think that there were men present who had walked the beat in the domed helmets and handlebar moustaches of the Edwardian era.

“Looks like a D.A.R. meeting,” McReary said.

Burke said, “You’ll get there soon enough, Jackie Cooper.”

Zagreb told them to shut up. He drummed his fingers on the cardboard file he held.

The four detectives stood at the bottom of the basement stairwell, waiting for Obolensky, the turnout sergeant, to finish his opening remarks to the officers fidgeting on their creaky folding chairs. The subterranean room smelled strongly of mildew and chicory coffee, heavily adulterated with the harsh root because of rationing. It was 6:10
A.M.
Sunday, June 20; ten minutes earlier, a hand grenade dropped in the vicinity of the huge medieval-looking electric coffee urn on the yellow pine table at the back of the room would have wiped out the department’s uniform division. A blue fog of cigarette smoke clung to the exposed pipes and bundles of electric wire between the ceiling joists.

Obolensky confined himself in his parade-ground yell to the dates and major details of the murders committed by Kilroy between the final week of May 1943, when it was believed Ernest Sullivan was slain and his body pushed into the river, and last Tuesday, when Florence Kitchen, sixty-four, of Dearborn, and Edgar Goss, forty-nine, a security guard employed ten years at J. L. Hudson’s, were killed in the department store in the presence of approximately forty shoppers and employees. Then he introduced Zagreb, who came forward and spread open his file folder atop the podium.

“Kilroy has been identified,” he said. “Teletype received from the FBI yesterday afternoon matched prints found on the briefcase and bayonet scabbard he left behind at Hudson’s to Ladislaus Ziska, born 4-20-1918 in Ypsilanti. Don’t bother trying to spell the name, it’s on the sheet Sergeant Canal is handing out.” The big plainclothesman was making his way down one side of the room with a stack of mimeographed pages. “Father Wenceslaus Ziska, Bohemian, naturalized citizen, served in the AEF during the First World War, present whereabouts unknown. Divorce decree issued
in absentia
by Washtenaw County on grounds of desertion 12-7-31. Mother deceased 8-30-39 of trauma to the trachea caused by strangulation, possibly at the hands of a fellow patient, although her son was questioned by the Ypsilanti police and released for lack of evidence. Case remains open.

“On 12-8-41, Ziska attempted to join the army, but was rejected for mental instability. At that time he was living in a furnished room on Mount Elliott. He left it a month later without leaving a forwarding address.” Zagreb had apologized to the young woman who was living there now, a ball-bearing inspector at the Hudson naval gun factory in Centerline, for knocking her down when she opened the door to clear the field of fire in case Ziska tried to go out a window. “He has a 1937 Nash sedan registered in his name at the old address. Medium gray, Michigan license John Thomas six eight two nine.”