Jitterbug (8 page)

Aside from convincing him that the Levinski woman had been Kilroy’s second victim, the details of the Flatrock case were no help. The victim, Ernest Sullivan, was a retired Cork-town bartender, reported missing three days before by his daughter, who after the body was discovered insisted she knew nothing about unredeemed ration stamps. Neighbors and merchants in stores where he shopped reported seeing fistfuls of stamps bound with rubber bands whenever he took out his wallet, but added that he seldom used them, paying for non-ration items with cash. No wallet was found on the body, and the local police assumed the motive was robbery. Details of the autopsy were a close match with Dr. Edouard’s in the Yegerov killing and Zagreb’s own observation of the corpse in the Levinski case. All three victims had been sliced open lengthwise like watermelons.

Zagreb laid the file atop the debris on the desk, thumbed down to the folder marked LEVINSKI, and looked through the contents, setting aside the crime-scene and autopsy photos, which were useless to anyone but a student of geriatric anatomy. Again he fingered the scrap of newsprint he had used to make an impression of the pen scratches on the varnished top of Anna Levinski’s lamp table. The photographer, who had done his best, had succeeded only in confirming what they’d already guessed, despite the many angles he had used in shooting the table and the chemicals he had used to treat the negatives. The script matched samples from grocery lists Mrs. Levinski had written, and the rest of “Hamtramck” and part of the house number proved she had recorded her address on something—shortly before she died, if the fresh ink stains on her hands were any indication. No pen had been found containing ink to match, and no recent documents on which she had written her address. He couldn’t help thinking that the reason she had been writing, and the fact that the killer appeared to have taken the pen and document with him when he left, were central to the solution. He wondered if she was ordering something. Posing as a salesman was one way to get inside a strange door.

OST

He said it aloud: “Oh
ess tee
.”

The photographer had been unable to coax any more letters out of the other part of what she had written; the pictures had nothing to add to that part of the paper in Zagreb’s hand. He produced another fold of newsprint from his inside breast pocket, his makeshift notebook, spread it out on the corner of the desk, and made a list:

MOST

HOST

GHOST

POST

POSTER

ROSTER

NOSTRIL

After that he went blank. None of the words helped. He refolded the sheet and returned it to his pocket. Maybe something better would occur to him when his brain was fresh. He wondered if Walters, the Hamtramck detective who had presided over the initial investigation, had had any luck canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses. He called the Hamtramck PD, but got only a desk sergeant who told him Walters wouldn’t be in until 8:00
A.M.
tomorrow. Zagreb’s Wittnauer said it was ten past one. He rang off without saying good-bye.

He walked back to his apartment. He’d let the others have the car and his own vehicle, a 1939 Plymouth coupe, was in storage. The garage fees were less than he would have spent on gasoline and oil and tires even if he had the ration tickets, and between his rent and the mortgage payments on a house he was no longer living in he had barely enough left to buy cigarettes and groceries. Anyway, he did some of his best thinking when he was walking. Just now he was thinking that for all the good his thinking was doing the City of Detroit he might as well enlist in the navy. No one expected you to use your brain when you were swabbing a deck.

At Fort he stopped and waited for the light to change, he didn’t know why. There were no cars in sight, not another person on the street. If it weren’t for the lights he saw in several of the buildings, he might have thought a blackout was in effect. He wondered if the end of the war, if it ever ended, would bring back the city’s nightlife, or if people would grow accustomed to early evenings, cheap novels printed on coarse paper, and necessities doled out by a stern bureaucracy. Already the days of neon lights in Cadillac Square and weekend jaunts to Windsor seemed part of a past so remote it might have been something described to him by his grandfather.

While he was waiting he shook a Chesterfield out of the pack and rattled the remaining contents. Only two more. He couldn’t remember if there had been another unopened pack in the carton that morning or if this were the last. He glanced at the Cunningham’s on the opposite corner, willing it to be open. The
CLOSED
sign was in the door. There was a light in the display window to discourage burglars, beyond which he could see part of the magazine rack and, tantalizingly, rows of crisp cigarette cartons in front of the pharmacy counter. He sighed and returned the unlit cigarette to the pack. He needed one to put himself to bed, another to wake himself up in the morning, and a third with his coffee.

He looked again at the drugstore window. The light had changed, but he’d lost interest in it. One of the glossy magazine covers in the rack was partially obscured behind a Revlon lipstick display on an easel in the window. All he could read were the last three letters of the magazine’s name: OST.

He recognized the typeface and the distinctive style of the cover illustration. There was no need for a closer look, but he crossed the street and stood in front of the window, leaning close and cupping his hands around his eyes to block the glare from the corner streetlight. From that angle he could see the entire cover. It featured a Norman Rockwell painting of a gang of half-dressed boys running away from a pond with a
NO SWIMMING
sign prominently displayed. It was the July issue of the
Saturday Evening Post.

H
E SHAVED OFF THE
disappointing moustache first thing Sunday morning. Taylor hadn’t worn one in
Bataan,
and the clean look shouted America, drowning out cries for Hitler’s toothbrush and Tojo’s graying chevron. While his hands were occupied with the razor, Father Coughlin came on WJR and he was forced to suffer through the bombast. He had once listened avidly to the fiery pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, only to tune out when Coughlin broke with FDR and denounced him as anti-God.

He was a great admirer of Roosevelt. The economy was of no interest to him, and First Lady Eleanor’s efforts to raise the status of American Negroes left him unmoved, but the “Day of Infamy” speech on December 8, 1941, had made him a disciple. He’d seen and heard the speech in a newsreel at the State and gone directly from there to the Armory to sign up. His subsequent rejection had only reinforced his conviction that the president was surrounded with traitors.

One of these was U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle. It was Biddle who had resisted his chief executive’s order to intern all 600,000 German aliens registered in the United States. Biddle’s move to round up 125,000 Japanese-Americans was hardly conciliatory. The first man, the man he’d seen buying oranges in the Eastern Market with cash from a wallet stuffed with unredeemed ration stamps, had looked a little like Biddle in a picture he’d seen of the attorney general with Roosevelt in
Liberty.
He’d followed him down to the river, waited for a young couple dressed up for a concert at Ford Auditorium to pass, then moved in from behind, cut him, and tipped him into the water, reaching down to grip the fat wallet, effectively allowing the old man to fall away from his hoard. It was all over in three seconds.

He rinsed, toweled off, and stepped through the open bathroom door to change stations on the tombstone-shaped Philco that came with the apartment, but there was no war news and he turned it off. He hadn’t been able to add a flag pin to the
National Geographic
map since Pantelleria. He hoped the troops weren’t bogged down in trenches. World War I movies, obsessed with rows of tin-hatted doughboys wallowing in mud behind coils of barbed wire, depressed and disillusioned him. They pushed the pacifist party line by making soldiering as unromantic as ditch-digging.

He ran a finger down the radio guide he’d torn from the
Free Press
and taped to the top of the sideboard, stopping at the selection he’d circled in pencil:

9:00 P.M. (EDT)

NBC-BLUE: HOLLYWOOD PLAYHOUSE—JOHN GARFIELD, GUEST.

Garfield was an actor he’d liked in
Air Force.
He’d played a G.I. who at the climax hoisted a hefty fifty-caliber machine gun to his hip and chopped down a Japanese Zero for strafing a buddy in a parachute; Taylor couldn’t have done it better.

He looked at his wristwatch, a waterproof Hamilton in a brass case with a shatterproof crystal, approved by the U.S. Navy. Then he switched on the fan in front of the open window, as if moving the sluggish air around would make the twelve and a half hours go faster. The fan, gleaming aluminum with a cast-iron base and a housing shaped like the nacelle of a B-17, whirred and lifted the loose end of the radio guide. He glanced around, located the Modern Library edition of
Mein Kampf
on the coffee table, and laid it atop the rectangle of newsprint. Hoping to understand the mind of the enemy, he’d struggled through the first twenty pages, then put it down and gone to see
Hitler’s Children
instead. The movies and the radio were his principal sources of information. At times he thought they spoke to him directly, in coded messages tailored to him alone. The newspapers were all anti-FDR, and so pro-Nazi. He looked forward to the trials after the war.

He kept most of his personal items in the cheap maple sideboard there in the living room, the bedroom being too small to contain a proper dresser. He opened the top drawer and removed the gleaming metal sheath from beneath a stack of shirts. It was fourteen inches long including the handle, nickel-plated steel with a mirror finish. When he grasped the bayonet, the blade slid free with almost no effort. It was unplated; naked steel darker than the sheath and not as shiny, but the edges were blue where they sloped down from the vane. He spent hours each week whetting them against a stone worn round at the edges like soap. He could shave with the bayonet if he so chose, could cut paper with it. A 1916 patent date was engraved next to the serial number on the underside of the hilt.

The weapon had never been issued. He’d bought it from an army surplus store in Ypsilanti with money he had stolen from his mother’s purse when he was eleven. She had not missed the money. She never kept track of the amounts she got from men, or how much she spent on liquor. An undersize youth, malnourished and hollow in the chest, he had bought the bayonet to defend himself against her rages, but he hadn’t been able to get to it when she seized him and with the help of one of her men friends stripped and chained him to his bed as punishment for removing all the pictures of his father from the family album and refusing to tell what he had done with them.

That was near the end. After three days a suspicious neighbor broke into the apartment while his mother was out and found him spread-eagled naked in a wallow of his own feces and urine. The police and juvenile authorities were waiting when she returned from the liquor store. After several sessions a psychiatrist had declared her incompetent to stand trial and she was committed to the Ypsilanti State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

There had been only three pictures of his father in the album: a wedding shot in the old style, the couple looking glum with the name of the studio embossed in silver script beneath; a sepia-tone service photo, stern face, dress tunic, and cap; and a sawtooth-edged snap of him grinning at the camera, stripped to the waist and kneading a sponge, one foot propped up on the running board of his new 1928 Hudson.

The snapshot no longer existed. His son had torn it and the wedding photo into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet. It had been the only evidence that his father hadn’t died at Chateau-Thierry. He’d told that story so many times and with such detail that he found himself believing it for long stretches, could see the smoke and shreds of canvas and plywood splinters and feel the heat as he described them. Before he had stopped displaying it on a wall, he had told people the bayonet was his father’s, a trench weapon he’d carried to defend himself in case his plane was shot down over enemy territory. The real story, that his father had left him sitting in the auditorium of the Grand Circus Theater to get a candy bar, didn’t tell as well. He had sat through three showings of a Felix the Cat cartoon, a creaky travelogue on Tahiti, a
March of Time
newsreel about revolutions in Argentina and Brazil, and the feature,
Hell’s Angels,
watching Ben Lyon and James Hall shoot down countless Germans from their fragile biplanes for the love of Jean Harlow, and then an usher had glared a flash-light in his face and a policeman took him home. That night, while his mother finished off a bottle of vodka in the kitchen, he had hung on to the sides of his bed, barrel-rolling and turning Immelmanns in a sky filled with choking smoke, triggering his Lewis gun while the brute faces of the enemy contorted and dissolved behind sheets of cleansing flame.

“Hi.”

He hilted the bayonet with a click and returned it to its drawer. The girl was standing in the bedroom doorway, wearing the shirt he’d had on the night before. The makeup she’d substituted for nylons started above her knees and ended at the insteps of her bare feet. She looked as if she’d been wading in muck.

“Is the bathroom free?” she asked. “I have to make a winky.”

He hesitated. For a moment he’d had no idea who she was and what she was doing in his apartment. Then he remembered. It had been easier than getting rid of her.

“Just a second.” He went past her through the open door into the bathroom, snatched the wallet photo of Robert Taylor from the frame of the mirror, slipped it into his hip pocket, and stepped back out. “Okay.”