Jitterbug (6 page)

“Any cash in the wallet?” Zagreb lit a Chesterfield. His throat was raw from smoking but he wanted to take the edge off the carnal stench.

The inspector turned a page. “Thirty-three dollars. It wasn’t robbery.”

“Ration stamps?”

“Third of a book, in the upper right-hand inside pocket of his coat. Butter and eggs mostly.”

“So why am I here?”

Brandon turned to Edouard, whose glass blue eyes brightened. “Single laceration, proceeding upward from first penetration at a thirty-degree oblique for sixty-six centimeters, right to left, beginning at the ilium and ending at the clavicle. Complete severance of the external iliac, inferior epigastric, sternal, musculophrenic, and superior epigastric arteries. Death by desanguination in less than two minutes. First time I ever conducted an autopsy without touching a postmortem knife.” He made his noiseless laugh.

“Shit.” Zagreb blew out smoke with the expletive.

“There’s more,” the inspector said. “Owners of businesses carry keys. No keys were found on the body. First uniform on the scene went to the dry-cleaning shop and found the door unlocked, the key still in the hole with the ring hanging from it. No sign the place was tossed, but maybe the killer knew where to look.”

“Maybe Yegerov left his keys.”

“Not on the outside of the door, on his way out. Forensics is dusting.”

“Stamps?”

“Haven’t found any. If our man knew where to look we won’t.”

“Doesn’t make sense. If he went to all that trouble he wouldn’t have left the ones on the body. He must’ve been after something else.”

“Something like what?”

The lieutenant took a haul, dropped the cigarette, and crushed it out on the tile. He was burning more these days and smoking less. “If this was Prohibition I’d say he was after cleaning fluid. Maybe he left his shirts.”

“He was probably in a hurry when he tossed the body. Maybe he overlooked the ration book.”

“It’d be the first one he’s overlooked. Any scribbles by the body or near the shop? Walls, sidewalk? ‘Kilroy Was Here,’ anything like that?”

“No, and I wouldn’t let that out if I were you. The news-hounds will sniff this one out soon enough without a hook like that.”

“How long are you suspending the uniform for?”

Brandon measured out his diplomat’s smile. With the white temples he looked more like an ambassador than the son of a German brewer. “Reprimand. Can’t spare the manpower. There’s a war on, you know? He expected me to boot him up to the squad. I said he must’ve been home sick the day they told his class at the academy it isn’t a uniform’s job to go through a victim’s pockets.”

“You should’ve booted him up. He’s got a better head on his shoulders than all of Homicide.”

“We’d’ve got to the store eventually.”

“After some Four-F burglar found the door open and tossed the place.”

The inspector stopped smiling. “The M.O.’s Kilroy’s. Right-handed sweep from behind. You want it or not? Wartime priority,” he added, showing his teeth.

“I’ll tinker with it.” Zagreb looked at Edouard. “Weapon?”

“Long blade, razor-sharp, no give. At a guess, high-tempered steel, probably double-edged. A fighting weapon.”

“Bowie?”

“Too clumsy. This was more like a long incision.”

“You mentioned a postmortem knife.”

“Possibly. Probably not. I wouldn’t want to attack a living body with a hiltless knife. The idea is to spill the victim’s blood, not yours.”

“That eliminates Jack the Ripper.” Brandon put away his notebook. “Have fun with it. I’ve got a nigger killing on Second I ought to poke my nose into. Probably just some hillbilly, but Jack Witherspoon wants brass on the scene. He had his picture taken with Eleanor Roosevelt once.”

“Once’d do it for me,” Edouard said. “She’s got a face like a Chihuahua’s ass.”

Zagreb wondered if all the Democrats were in Europe.

He remained behind to ask the coroner’s man a few questions. Edouard’s answers were brief and desultory; his interest in the lieutenant had vanished when the cut-open corpse had failed to draw the proper reaction. When he was finished Zagreb went back out to the general offices, where he found the rest of the racket squad taking up space in the reception room.

He was irked by their inactivity. Canal, who had a talent for buttonholing supernumeraries and sending them out on errands, was finishing a bottle of Coke. Two empties were already lined up on the edge of a battleship gray steel desk with a covered typewriter atop it; he averaged two minutes per 6.5-ounce bottle. Baldy McReary stood with his hands in his pockets, studying a chart of the female anatomy on a bulletin board next to the door, all its secrets exposed like the tunnels and chambers of an ant farm pressed between panes of glass. Burke had claimed a chair with square steel legs, sitting with his knees at right angles and his hands, surprisingly small and fragile-looking at the ends of his big wrists, gripping his thighs. He looked like someone determined to hold the position against a couple of regiments of Japanese. In reality he was probably struggling to maintain the flow of oxygen to his brain. The carbolic smell that dominated the autopsy rooms had penetrated to every room of the building, and Burke, who had shot and killed two men when he was with the uniform division and been suspended for strangling a third nearly to death in interrogation, hated corpses to the point of phobia. Recently he had refused to serve as pallbearer for the aunt who had raised him.

A portable radio encased in tough fabric with a Bakelite grille was going on about Pantelleria, but nobody appeared to be listening. No one in the room had ever heard of the island before the marines hit it. The announcer sounded as excited as if they’d taken Rome.

“Ladies, I guess I’m the stiff-watcher for this outfit,” said Zagreb, being sure to make the comment general. Burke was inclined to sulk.

“One gob of guts looks pretty much like all the rest.” McReary blew a kiss to the anatomy chart and turned away. “Is it our boy?”

“Brandon thinks it is.”

Canal clunked down his empty bottle and belched dramatically. “That means he don’t think he can tie it up. They ought to issue us brooms. All we do is sweep up everybody else’s crap.”

“We’d better get to sweeping quick. Three’s the limit before the papers catch wind.” The lieutenant gave them the details on Simeon Yegerov.

“It don’t figure,” Canal said. “Boys like Kilroy don’t light out till they get what they’re after. He’d frisk the stiff in the middle of the Hudson’s parade.”

Zagreb said, “We’ll park that for now. Twice he’s taken ration stamps. A lot of ration stamps. Either he likes big breakfasts and ball-busting auto trips or he’s laying them off somewhere. And there’s only one place to sell them in this town.”

Burke came out of his trance. “The Conductor.”

“Frankie Fucking Orr.” Canal tasted it, liking it more with each syllable.

McReary touched the tender spot on the side of his neck, as if it alone had prevented him from coming up with the answer first.

Zagreb’s Wittnauer had stopped. He shook it, wound the stem. The sweep hand started moving. His Timex self-winder had given up the ghost just before Dunkirk. All the other self-winders had gone to war and he hadn’t gotten into the habit of winding regularly. “What time is it?”

McReary checked the Curvex strapped to the underside of his wrist. “A little after eleven. Roma’s stopped serving an hour ago.”

“Roma’s stops serving when Frankie goes home,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve been turning over Kilroy’s dry turds long enough. Let’s just this once get out in front of the cocksucker.”

“T
HAT WAS THE BEST
movie,” the girl said.

“It was great. I like Robert Taylor.”

He thought it was” the finest movie ever made. He’d been eager to see
Bataan
ever since it went into production. He had read about it in
Parade,
seen a picture of Taylor, in combat fatigues and smoking a cigarette, going over the script with the director, and had been checking off the days on the calendar before the release date as conscientiously as he kept track of allied engagements with flag pins on the war map in his living room. The final shot of Taylor, the last American on the island, chopping away with a water-cooled machine gun at swarms of victorious Japs like a twentieth-century General Custer, thrilled him, filling him with nationalistic pride and validating his conviction that the U.S. could never be beaten, even if it lost every battle but the last. He knew he would go back to see it again and again.

He had met the girl in the course of his employment as a messenger. It was the third job he’d had that year. Jobs held no value, they were all around, provided the person who applied knew that he would have to move on as soon as the man he was replacing came back from the service. He never waited for that to happen. When he became bored enough he quit.

Her name was Erma, with an
E.
She had been standing behind the cosmetics counter at D.J. Healy when he came in with a stack of order forms and had directed him to the manager’s office. His collegiate good looks appealed to many different kinds of women; he knew by the way her professional smile stretched a couple of notches at the corners when she spoke to him that she was his to take out for the asking, and probably to bed. She was a thin blonde with a nose that tilted up like Myrna Loy’s. She told him she had applied to the department store hoping to model fashions, but she was an inch too short. Since she couldn’t see a future making tracer bullets at King Seeley’s she took a job squirting perfume on fat women from St. Clair Shores, rich Grosse Pointe women doing their shopping mostly at Lord’s and Gately’s. All this he had found out over a plate of veal served San Francisco style at Lelli’s. He found her loathsomely boring. If he weren’t sensitive about being seen too often alone at movies—the fifth-column shrink at the Light Guard Armory had asked him, in a tone that suggested curiosity rather than routine, if he was a homosexual—he would have made some excuse and taken her home. Now they were walking among the patrons, trickling out of the baroque interior of the Michigan Theater, she clinging to his arm, he fishing in a pocket of his pleated civilian slacks for his keys. It was a warm June night, late but not long past dark on the extreme western edge of the Eastern Time Zone. Big Band blare spilled out the open windows of cruising cars, scattered fireflies struck blue-green sparks in the dark between streetlamps. Now and then Erma switched her hips to a snatch of “In the Mood” or “Song of India.” He bet she was a jitterbug. He hadn’t taken a girl dancing since before Pearl Harbor. He considered it improper to expend so much energy in wartime to no good result.

“Someone told me once I looked like Taylor. I didn’t believe her.” He watched her out of the corner of his eye.

She leaned away from his arm to squint at his profile. “You were right.” She huddled back in. Her chunky heels made an irritating clacking noise on the sidewalk.

He probed. “It could have been worse. She might have said Humphrey Bogart.”

“He doesn’t look so bad. I thought he was handsome in
The Roaring Twenties.
He wore pretty suits and he wasn’t as short as Jimmy Cagney. Anyway I don’t see why all the girls like Robert Taylor. Van Johnson is much better looking.”

“I can’t picture him.”

“He was dreamy in
The Human Comedy.
Piles and piles of wavy blond hair. You’re blond, aren’t you? It’s hard to tell with all that stuff you put on.”

He resisted the impulse to smooth back his hair. He never put on a hat when he was wearing civvies. “I only go to war movies.”

“Oh, this was about war. It all took place in a small town, and the war kept coming and taking people away. I think small towns are quaint. My uncle and aunt used to have a cabin on Houghton Lake and we’d stop in small towns along the way and have a soda.”

He wondered if her uncle and aunt hoarded ration stamps.

“Where should we go now?” she asked. “Sammy Kaye’s playing at the Eastwood Gardens. I love Ishkabibble.”

“Ishkabibble’s with Kay Kyser.” He unlocked the door on the passenger’s side of his Nash and opened it for her. “Don’t you have to be at work early?’

“Tomorrows Saturday, silly. Don’t tell me you’re running out of steam.” She swung into the seat, flashing a Copper-toned calf with a seam drawn up the back with eyebrow pencil. At least she didn’t hoard nylons.

He slid under the wheel and checked his hair in the rearview mirror. It looked glossy black under the domelight.

“I’ve been on my feet all day. I’ll take you someplace for dessert.”

“Carl’s?”

“Closed by now.” He punched the starter. “Roma’s Cafe stays open late sometimes. Depends on who’s there.”

“Roma’s, then.” She commandeered the mirror to touch up her lipstick.

R
ESTAURANTS IN GENERAL ASPIRE
to be more than they are. Roma Cafe—“Roma’s” popularly, the possessive case assigned by mass mutual agreement—aspired to be less. Its name and location, in the 3400 block of Riopelle north of the Eastern Market, home of sows ears, fresh goat meat, and dead fowl with the feathers on, suggested an old-fashioned Italian eatery. The red-and-white-checked tablecloths and basketed Chianti bottles suspended from the ceiling managed to capture the flavor of an unprepossessing establishment where a family of four could get in and out for under fifty dollars. In reality there were cases of Mumm’s champagne in the storeroom, boxes of imported squid packed in dry ice in the walk-in refrigerator, and even a superficial total of the prices on the menu customarily handed to the head of each party resembled a bid for a defense contract.

The restaurant’s history was the history of Detroit in the twentieth century. It had been in operation since 1907, had seen the city evolve from the Stove Capital of the United States to the world’s premier automobile vendor, and witnessed the laying of the first course of bricks on the first skyscraper downtown. Theodore Roosevelt had dined there in 1916 after delivering his famous, “Damn the mollycoddles” speech at the Detroit Opera House. The next year the proprietors had hosted a party for the doughboys of the 31st Infantry before they shipped out for France. Walter Reuther and Richard T. Frankensteen, bruised and bleeding from the “Battle of the Overpass” with Harry Bennett’s Ford Motor Company strikebreakers, had wolfed down plates of pasta in the kitchen at the exact moment the Ford goons were celebrating their victory with red wine and calamari in the dining room. Rallies had taken place there to elect William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, and campaign workers in straw hats and armbands reading
REPEAL THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT
had drunk smuggled Canadian whiskey and huddled around a Philco Cathedral radio set brought in to monitor the FDR landslide in 1932. Caruso and Garibaldi lived still in frames on the wall behind the bar. The Caruso was signed. General MacArthur fell two inches shy of covering the faded rectangle where Mussolini’s likeness had quietly been removed on the Day of Infamy.