Jitterbug (13 page)

“I’m looking for the lieutenant.”

A bald head tilted toward the cubicle. “That’s his office.”

Dwight went over there. The gold lettering on the frosted glass read
LT. M. ZAGREB.
He raised his fist to knock.

“He’s out now,” said the man at the desk.

Man let him walk all that way.

“Know when he’ll be back, boss?”

“Later.”

“Can I wait?”

“Free country.”

Dwight sat on a ladderback chair next to a desk with a name-plate that read
SGT. S. CANAL.
The swivel stood in front of the square plaster post that held up the ceiling. There was a hair-oil stain on the institutional green paint where the back of the sergeant’s head came into contact with it when he leaned back in his chair. Above the stain, yellowed Scotch tape held a sheet of ruled notepaper with a penciled legend printed in round upper-and lowercase letters, as by a child:

There is more law at the end of a nightstick than in all the courts in the land.

Feeling more out of place than he had since coming to Michigan, Dwight folded his hands in his lap and concentrated on making himself invisible. A long minute crawled past before the typing resumed. After a while the monotonous rhythm became its own soothing kind of silence, against which he heard the sounds of other life in the building coming up the ventilation ducts and through the open transom over the door. Telephones rang, Lowell Thomas’s voice recited a long list of unpronounceable Russian place names on a radio snarling with static. An overloaded metal file drawer boomed shut—office artillery. Dwight looked up at the big electric clock, calculating how long he could wait for an interview that might take ten minutes. When he’d called in to the plant pleading family emergency he’d promised to try to make it in by eleven. He had fifty minutes if the buses were running on schedule.

After twenty minutes a man came in whom Dwight remembered from the Forest Club. The second biggest of the four men in plainclothes, he was the best dressed and the oldest-looking—forty anyway, with a tired posture that suggested his custom shirt was the only thing holding him up.

The hair on the backs of his hands was as coarse as wire. He spotted Dwight right away, but didn’t look his way again even when it was clear he was discussing the presence of a stranger with the young bald man at the desk. They spoke in low murmurs, lost under the high ceiling and the purring of the inadequate fan. Two or three minutes of that, and then the newcomer sat down at a desk by the windows and picked up a telephone and started dialing. His conversation this time was louder, he had a bad connection. He asked who was running at the fairgrounds, listened, then placed twenty dollars on Betty Blitz’s nose. After that he made another call, less comprehensible from his end of the conversation. The other man continued typing, scraps of life elsewhere in the building drifted into the room, and Dwight wallowed in the conviction that he didn’t matter.

He had, he reasoned, ten minutes’ grace, and was planning his exit and his route to the nearest bus stop when the hall door opened and the man he now knew as Lieutenant Zagreb entered, accompanied by the big goggle-eyed plainclothesman who from the process of elimination Dwight identified as Sergeant Canal. The lieutenant looked small in his companion’s presence, compact in the same black suit he’d had on the night before and gray winter fedora. He was in fact six inches taller than Dwight; his large head, like a brainy scientist’s in a movie with a Nazi kidnap plot, contributed to the illusion. He paused before the bald man’s desk and spoke with him quietly for thirty seconds. Dwight had risen at his entrance, and a glance in his direction from the bald man told him he was being talked about once again, but Zagreb never gave him a glance, and after a moment walked straight to his cubicle and unlocked the door and went in and closed it behind him.

Sergeant Canal hung his hat on the hall tree, by the door to the corridor and came over and sat down behind his desk. He looked it over as if to determine that none of the objects on top had been moved, slid open the belly drawer and looked at its contents. He shut it and swiveled his eyes toward Dwight.

“You can go in.”

The inside of the cubicle smelled of dry dust and pulp paper, musty like old magazines. Zagreb was sitting behind a wooden desk heaped with papers and curled file folders, his face illuminated eerily from below in the reflected light of a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade. The shade had a crack, and Dwight stepped to one side to take the jagged blade of white light out of his eye. Lighted that way and with his hat off, the lieutenant’s head above the eyebrows looked as big as a world globe.

“Your name’s Dwight?”

It took Dwight a second to nod. He’d had no indication he’d been recognized from last night.

“You don’t look much like your brother.”

“I thought we all looked alike.” He tried to smile.

No reaction. “You’re new to Detroit.”

It was a statement, but Dwight answered it as if it were a question. “Yes, boss. We come up from Alabama in January.”

“How do you like our winter?”

“I expected it be cold. Didn’t know summer’d be so hot, though.”

“You’ve been to the jail, I guess.”

“They said somebody done took Earl away.”

“He’s in an interrogation room downstairs. We wanted to ask him some questions.”

Dwight said nothing. After a little silence Zagreb switched off the desk lamp and sat back. His suit coat slid open, exposing the cherry handle of the revolver in his underarm holster. “Take a seat.”

The only other chair was stacked with newspapers. Dwight lifted the stack, looked around for a horizontal surface, and transferred it to the floor. It was a wooden chair with arms, not as uncomfortable as the one in the squad room.

“Where do you live, Dwight? You don’t mind if I call you Dwight.”

The lieutenant’s tone hadn’t changed. It wasn’t unfriendly, but it wasn’t as friendly as the words. Dwight said it didn’t make any difference to him. “Ypsi,” he said. “I got me a room.”

“You learn fast. There are hillbillies living there a year who still say
Yip
-see. You smoke, Dwight?” He plucked a fresh-looking pack of Chesterfields out of his shirt pocket.

“No, sir, I never got the habit.”

“Too bad. I read in
Reader’s Digest
it’s good for your system. Kills germs.” He stuck one between his lips and snicked open his lighter. It wouldn’t fire. He found a match and used an old scar on the edge of the desk to scratch it. “Fucking Ronson. Lost my Zippo. You read
Reader’s Digest,
Dwight?”

He wanted to say this was bullshit. “Just the jokes.”

“You read magazines, though.
Saturday Evening Post
?”

“Sometimes. When can I take Earl home?”

“That depends on your brother, Dwight. Right now he’s refusing to answer our questions.”

“What questions? All he done was get himself caught carrying around a old Hupmobile stick.”

“We’re holding him for treason.”

Dwight’s blood went to his feet. He couldn’t say the word and didn’t think he ever had. It shamed him that his first thought was, Jesus God, what’s Earl gone and got himself into now?

He was aware Zagreb was studying him closely. He didn’t bother trying to put on any sort of face. He didn’t know which one the lieutenant was looking for.

“We haven’t charged him yet. That’ll bring in the FBI, and we’re not ready to give him up. We opened his locker at Willow Run. Plant security’s cooperative, we didn’t have to get a warrant. We’ve applied for one to search his house. If we find there what we found in his locker, we’ll have no choice but to notify the feds.”

Dwight felt drained. The son of a bitch was making him ask. “What’d you find?”

“Ration stamps.”

“Everybody gots ration stamps.”

“Everybody doesn’t have a shoebox stuffed full of them.”

“Hoarding ain’t against the law.”

Zagreb stabbed out the cigarette in a dirty bronze ashtray. It was only half-smoked. His face looked tired and pale under the great brow.

“Rationing only went into effect this year,” he said. “That’s not long enough for one man to have hoarded as many as we found in that box. He stole them, Dwight, and he’s selling them on the black market. Treason in time of war’s a hanging offense, Dwight. No appeal.”

I
NEED TO ASK
a favor,” Dwight said.

“Ask, Dwight,” Zagreb said.

“Stop calling me Dwight.”

Zagreb blinked. “You said it didn’t make any difference.”

“You weren’t talking about hanging my brother then.”

“You prefer ‘Mr. Littlejohn’?”

“I wouldn’t answer to it. Nobody ever called me that. I just need to ask you to stop saying Dwight every time you open your mouth. What I mean is, there’s only two of us here. I think I can figure out who you’re talking to.”

“That sounds just a little bit uppity, Dwight.”

“I guess that’s Mr. Ford’s fault. We all the same on the line.”

The lieutenant might have smiled then, or he might not have, and it might or might not have meant amusement. You never could tell with white men.

“Okay, Dwight. I mean okay.”

Dwight relaxed a little. He didn’t know if he’d scored a point or lost one. He was a little surprised to find out he didn’t care. He didn’t care about catching the bus either. “Now what’s this shit about treason?”

“One of those Washington words. You won’t find it in the city code. I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but J. Edgar’s got special agents coming out of his ass and I’m just a street cop with a wartime staff you could carry in your hip pocket. I’m only interested in clearing up a string of murders. You read about it? That’s right, you don’t read newspapers.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the stack Dwight had removed from the chair.

The
Detroit Times
was on top. Dwight leaned over and picked it up. The banner read
‘KILROY’ KILLER STILL AT LARCE.
The story had bumped the war news to a spot below the fold. There was a drawing of a man’s head, a blank oval with a question mark where the face should be. It looked old-fashioned.

“That’s a headline they run when they’ve got nothing new to say,” Zagreb said. “That fucking Hearst. Diddles Marion Davies and then instead of smoking a cigarette like anyone else he picks up the phone and tells his editors to write news stories without any news in them. The fucking Krauts just wiped out an entire town in Czechoslovakia. The whole thing, right down to the last wooden shoe. Don’t bother looking for it there. It’s in the second section.”

“I don’t think they wear wooden shoes in Czechoslovakia.”

“Who gives a shit? Not Hearst, that’s for sure. Anyway, you can see what I’m up against. If I don’t close this one, I’m in a landing craft on my way to some little shit island in the South Pacific. I’m a coward, Dwight.” He made a face. “Sorry, forgot. I’m a coward. I’d rather buy bonds.”

Dwight folded the paper and laid it in his lap. The cop still thought he was a dumb nigger, acting at him that way. “My brother ain’t perfect. He blows with the first wind. He ain’t no killer, though. What’s this Kilroy?”

“Not a thing. Somebody drew one of those cartoons on the sidewalk in front of the house where we found the second victim. Forensics is pretty sure it was there before the murder. It’d been rained on once. We haven’t had any rain in over a week. It’s catchy, though, isn’t it?” He lit another cigarette.

“It’s nice to see someone sticking up for his brother. It doesn’t explain all those ration stamps in his locker.”

“Ask him.”

“We did. We are. Earl’s not as smart as you. He’d rather swallow that gold tooth of his than tell us the day of the week.”

Dwight had a cold ball of clay in the pit of his stomach. Zagreb knew it. He leaned back, turned up the volume on a wooden cabinet radio perched on the radiator, listened for a moment to a male dispatcher who sounded like Fred Allen at the end of a long programming day, then turned it back down and leaned forward, resting his forearms on the heap on his desk. When he spoke again it was in a tone Dwight hadn’t heard from him.

“Earl’s not the man we’re looking for. I’ve got a theory about him. We’re keeping it out of the papers, so if you tell anyone you’ll be sorry you ever left Mississippi.”

“Alabama.”

“What do I know? I’ve never been south of Toledo. The point is if I’m right and it gets out and this piece of shit goes underground, I’m going to haul you off the line and take you to a certain hotel room in Paradise Valley and turn you over to Sergeant Canal. You’ve met Sergeant Canal?”

“I seen him.”

“He’s pretty hard to miss. There’s a rumor going around that big guys are gentle slobs. Sergeant Canal hasn’t heard that rumor.”

He figured it was time to shuffle a little. “I thinks I understands, boss.”

“Good. Now save that Amos and Andy shit for Marcus Garvey. I grew up in a mixed neighborhood. I’m not your everyday ofay.”

Dwight was impressed in spite of himself. Not many ofays were aware of the term.

“My theory is this dickhead got into the house on that second kill by posing as a guy selling magazine subscriptions. The victim, a woman, filled out some kind of form before she died. One of the things she wrote was what I think were the last three letters of the
Saturday Evening Post.
The house was in Hamtramck. You know about Hamtramck?”

“Polack town.”

“Ukrainians too, but the woman was Polish. Polacks hate niggers worse than Russians. I don’t know why. Maybe they just need somebody to look down on the way they’ve been looked down on by the Irish, who were looked down on by everybody else. Great city, Detroit. We’ve got so much hate we decided to export it, and that’s how we’re going to win this war. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Polacks hate niggers. There’s no way in hell your brother talked himself into that woman’s house. I don’t care if he was giving away free kielbasa and a stack of polka records.”

“So how come you’re holding him?”

“You keep forgetting those stolen ration stamps.”

Dwight lost his temper. It was his saving grace that when that happened his blood pressure dropped and so did his voice. Otherwise he’d have been beaten up and thrown into the Chattahoochee years ago. “Go ahead and charge him, then. Don’t keep handing me this treason shit. You hang everybody that finds some way to get around rationing, you’d have to duck your head every time you walk under a streetlight.”