Jitterbug (29 page)

“What’s going on?” Dwight asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t find a station that knows nothing. Most of them are signing off. It’s almost midnight. That’s good, isn’t it? They’d stay on the air if anything was wrong.”

He recognized the signs of early hysteria. “Where’s Earl?”

“I don’t know that either. He was fidgety, he said maybe he could find out what was going on. I asked him not to go out. He said he’d be okay on foot, he can run where he can’t take the car. That was an hour ago. I tried to call. It rang and rang and nobody ever answered.”

“Tried to call where?”

“The Forest Club.” She went on twisting the knob. “The stations don’t know nothing. One says they’re all over Paradise Valley. The other says they’re downtown.”

“Who?”

“White people, Dwight. Who you think? White people.”

B
URKE CRUISED PAST THE
address and parked the big Oldsmobile against the curb across from it. He killed the engine, but no one got out right away. Against the setting sun the house was as individual as a milk cap: two narrow stories of white frame built during the last war from available materials, pegged into a hill with the basement at ground level. It had red-and-white awnings and a shallow porch with potted plants on the railing and a rocking chair that didn’t look as if it had been sat in since the Armistice. A 1939 Buick with a dull coat of dark blue chalky-looking paint was parked nose-first in a separate garage with the doors open.

“Looks like a place where somebody’s mother lives,” McReary said.

“So did Ma Barker’s.” Zagreb looked at his Wittnauer: Nine hours had elapsed since the press conference. Time enough for any would-be Jack the Ripper to have fled halfway across Canada. “What’s the name, O’Reilly something?”

McReary got out his notebook. “Aura Lee Winsted, G.A.R. Her late husband served with the Twentieth Michigan, invalided out at Cold Harbor. She’s still collecting benefits.”

“We better hurry,” Canal said. “She must be a hundred.”

“Don’t bet on it. A lot of sweet young things latched themselves on to shaky veterans in their last years. Be getting pension checks till 1990.” Zagreb inspected the load in his .38, then put it back under his arm. “Baldy, you’re with me. You others keep an eye out for Robert Taylor.”

Canal said, “I got piles on my piles. Let Baldy stick with Burke.”

“I don’t need you scaring any widows.”

“She’s heard a thousand war stories. What’s to scare?”

“Okay, but keep your mouth shut.”

“That’s when he’s scariest,” McReary said.

Zagreb and the sergeant climbed the flight of concrete steps leading from the driveway to the front porch. The screen door was hooked. Zagreb rapped on the wooden frame. The woman who came out to peer at their IDs and unhook it stood barely five feet in low heels and weighed ninety pounds. She wore a tailored blue cotton suit with padded shoulders, pinched in at a waist that Canal could have encircled with his big hands. Her hair, worn in a Prince Valiant cut with bangs straight across, was died a corn shade of yellow, a sharp contrast to the leathery tan of her face, which when she smiled broke into stacks of wrinkles. She wore orange lipstick and rouge and white-framed eyeglasses with an Oriental slant. She shook hands with both detectives—hers were encased in white cotton gloves—and led them into a living room done all in shades of white and cream and yellow. A white shag throw-turned a camelback sofa into a polar bear and a buttermilk-colored Fada radio shaped like a bullet stood on the shallow fireplace mantel. If Mr. Winsted had left behind any souvenirs of his Civil War service, none was on display in the living room.

Her offer of lemonade declined, the three sat. The lieutenant asked about Ziska.

“That’s not his name,” she said. “I don’t think he’s the man you’re looking for, but he looks like the picture in the paper and he drives a gray car, I think it’s a Nash, but I don’t know much about kinds of cars. He’s on invalid leave from the Army Air Corps. He was wounded in combat. Now he sells war bonds.”

“Not magazine subscriptions?” Zagreb asked.

She pursed her orange lips, remembering. Then she shook her head. “No. He said war bonds. He’s been living here almost three months. A very nice young man.”

“Did he say where he was wounded?”

“The leg. The left one, I think. He limps sometimes.”

“What battle?” Canal asked.

Zagreb shot him a sharp look.

“He didn’t say. I don’t think he likes to talk about it. My Orville was the same way. He talked about his friends in the Twentieth, his sergeant, the things they did in town, but never Cold Harbor. Everything but that.”

“What name did he use?” Zagreb asked.

Wrinkles stacked her forehead. “Orville?”

“Your boarder.”

“Oh. William Bonney.”

On the landing outside the apartment, Zagreb asked Mrs. Winsted how long Bonney had been out.

“All day.” She sorted through a ring of keys attached to a Red Crown tab. “He doesn’t keep regular hours. He goes where the War Department sends him. Toledo sometimes.”

It was a three-room flat, no kitchen. “This was Orville’s study, where he kept his war mementoes. I donated them to Greenfield Village. We slept separately the last ten years; he had nightmares. I turned the closet into a bathroom after he passed on. These days a person just can’t get along on widow’s benefits.”

There was a table, a mohair sofa going threadbare on the arms, a three-drawer sideboard supporting a Philco tabletop radio, a
National Geographic
map of the European Theater on the wall with flag pins stuck in it. Canal went into the bedroom, came out right away shaking his head, and opened the door to the bathroom.

“Look out!” Zagreb jerked his .38.

His heart thudded in his ears, a Krupa drum crescendo. Then it tailed off. What had looked like a man jumping out of the bathroom was just an empty uniform hanging on the back of the door. The chocolate brown tunic draped a wooden hanger with khaki trousers folded neatly over the bottom bar and a dress cap with a shiny black visor on the hook above.

Canal, who had unholstered his own revolver, swiveled his eyes Zagreb’s way, reddened, and returned the gun to his armpit. Savagely he reached up and unhooked the hanger.

Mrs. Winsted was watching from the open door to the landing. “He must not be working today after all. He always wears it when he sells bonds.”

“Zag.”

Canal had exposed a black waterproof poncho hanging behind the uniform.

Zagreb said, “Yeah.”

Canal searched the uniform pockets while the lieutenant went through the shirts and underwear in the sideboard. The corner of a small square of stiff paper stuck up out of the crack between the bottom and back of the top drawer. He pulled it out. It was a gasoline ration stamp.

“That doesn’t really mean anything, does it?” asked Mrs. Winsted. “Everyone has stamps.”

“It may mean something that he has just one.”

“He probably carries them with him. It’s a good habit to get into. I’m always going off and forgetting mine and having to come back.”

“Nothing in the pockets,” Canal said.

“Check the bathroom.”

The landlady had come into the apartment and stood looking around. “He’s the neatest tenant I’ve ever had. Must be the military training. Orville was the same way until the last couple of years.” She looked at the gateleg table. “That’s where I put his meals when he’s been too busy to stop anywhere. I never charge him for them. I consider it part of my contribution to the war effort.”

Canal swung shut the medicine cabinet. “Clean. Toothbrush and paste and shaving stuff. No prescriptions.”

“How often does the trash man come around?” Zagreb asked Mrs. Winsted.

“Just once a week now. Wednesday. It used to be twice, but they’re all in the service now.”

“Where do you put your trash?”

“There’s a bin out back.”

“Could we take a look?”

“Certainly.” She touched the bare table. “I wonder what he’s done with the oilcloth.”

He drove back from Warren in a state of cold fury.

His supervisor at the messenger service had given him only five packages to deliver that morning, but the destinations were literally all over the map: one in Hamtramck, two in Birmingham, a fourth in Royal Oak, and the last in Warren, where he had been forced to simmer in a waiting room for two and a half hours because the package was a level 4, meaning it was to be placed in the hands of the addressee only, and the addressee was stuck in a meeting. He couldn’t even go away and come back later because the man’s secretary had no idea how long he’d be hung up and said he had to catch a train for Chicago as soon as he came out. There was the whole day shot. He was going to have to find a job that gave him as much freedom without running him ragged because there weren’t enough employees to go around.

To make matters worse, he’d blown a tube or something in his car radio. The dial glowed when he switched it on, but all he got when he twisted the tuning knob was various kinds of static. It wouldn’t have meant so much if he hadn’t been tied up all day. For all he knew the war had burst wide open. He had an uneasy feeling he was missing something important.

On Woodward, waiting for the light to change at Grand, he spotted a
Detroit News
box under a streetlamp and strained to see if he could make out the headline on the issue on display. His own face stared back at him from the front page.

He set the brake and got out, leaving the Nash in the traffic lane with the door open, thumbed a nickel into the slot, and snatched out a copy. As he turned away, a man in a wilted-looking Palm Beach suit and cocoa straw hat was looking at him on the sidewalk. He stared back until the man lowered his head and resumed walking.

The driver of the car behind his was blowing his horn when he slid back under the wheel. The light had changed. He drove through the intersection, then swung over into a parking space in the next block, leaning over to skim the story on the front page in the pool of light from the streetlamp. Then he threw the paper into the backseat and wheeled back out into traffic. He broke the wartime speed limit in the first quarter mile.

Zagreb and Canal followed Mrs. Winsted downstairs, through a kitchen with a gas refrigerator and range, and out the screen door in back. She turned on the floodlight over the driveway. From behind the steamshovel-shaped trash bin they could see the Oldsmobile parked on the street, its interior in shadow. Zagreb hoped McReary wasn’t talking Burke’s ear off. Baldy was a stakeout disaster.

He tipped back the lid. The stench of rotted vegetables came out in a gust. He took off his coat, exposing his shoulder harness, draped it over the iron railing of the back steps, and leaned in to sort through the stained paper sacks and empty cardboard boxes inside.

“I could use a hand here,” he said.

Canal said, “Shit,” under his breath—the landlady was standing on the back stoop, watching—and peeled out of his coat.

Zagreb pushed aside a bundle of newspaper, but it rolled back down against his arm. When he picked it up to shove it out of the way, its weight surprised him. He grasped it in both hands and tore it open. It was stuffed tight with ration tickets.

“What?” The sergeant couldn’t see.

“Kilroy was here.”

Tires scrunched to a halt on the asphalt driveway. Zagreb looked at the blunt hood of a gray Nash. From old habit his glance flicked down to the license plate—JT-6829—then up to the face behind the windshield, automatically superimposing upon it the artists sketch. For a microsecond, a splinter in the eye of Time that Zagreb would relive for the rest of his life, their gazes locked.

Then everything was movement. Gears crashed, Zagreb pulled his hands out of the bin and reached under his arm, the car went into reverse, the black Oldsmobile started up and swung away from the opposite curb into a U-turn, Burke trying to block the driveway. Canal, whose reflexes were fast for a man half his size, went into target-range stance in front of the garage, perpendicular to the street with his right arm extended and his revolver at the end. It barked twice. The windshield on the driver’s side collapsed.

But the car kept moving, picking up speed as it bumped over the curb. Its bulbous left-front fender struck the sleeker one of the Oldsmobile, shattering a headlight. Another crash of gears and then the Nash shot forward, two wheels jumping the sidewalk.

Now Zagreb and Canal were in the street, broken glass crunching underfoot, their shooting arms raised in perfect parallel, guns double-banging like carpenter’s hammers slightly out of synch. A bullet struck the sloping trunk with a clank. Another clipped the side-view mirror on the driver’s side.

Canal clawed open the back door of the Oldsmobile and piled in. Zagreb put a foot inside, pounding the roof with the hand holding his gun. “Go! Go! Go!”

Burke cramped the wheel and pressed down the pedal, turning the U into an O. Zagreb bounced down onto the seat, drawing in his other leg just as the car’s momentum swung the door shut. As they straightened out, picking up speed, Burke flipped on the siren. McReary unhooked the handset from the dash to call for backup.

“What the fuck he come back for?” Canal was panting. “He must’ve seen the papers, heard the radio. Why didn’t he just keep going?”

“He came back for something,” Zagreb said.

“What, his razor?”

“No. His uniform.”

D
WIGHT PUT ON THE
clothes he’d worn home from the hospital, the ones he’d had on when he was beaten in the men’s room at the Club Trocadero. Earl and Elizabeth had spent the night in the waiting room and had not thought to go home and bring back a change. Just sitting on the toilet lid, raising one leg to put on his pants, sent waves of pain throughout his body, but he’d refused Elizabeth’s help and didn’t want to take any medication because he needed to stay alert. When he pried himself to a standing position and looked at his reflection in the mirror above the sink, he thought he looked as much like Joe Louis as he had Saturday night, only now it was after the Schmeling fight.