“Diplomatic decision. The one they have was in the can: Medical deferment. Bad prostates are winning the war for Hitler.” Zagreb plunked himself into a chair at a vacant desk, of which the squad room was in good supply since before Corregidor. “How’d I come off?”
“Little to the right of Mussolini. Lucky the Free Press wasn’t there.”
“They’ll be screaming for my shield come the next edition.” He looked at his Wittenauer. “Dugan’s made bail by now.”
The telephone rang on Canal’s desk. The big man answered it and held it out. “Some dame.”
“That’ll be his bail.” He got up to take it. He was right. It was Shirley.
“What happened, Zag? Jerry says you sucker-punched him.”
“He threw all the punches. It wasn’t his fault none of them connected. Well, it was. A guy who can’t throw a right jab or a left hook should stick to knitting socks for the marines.”
A sigh came down the line. “He’s going to be a handful, isn’t he?”
“A blowtop like that’s wasted outside a torpedo tube. I can’t keep the peace and sit on his head too. You need to put more men on the job, but the hundred-and-first airborne’s busy.”
“Is he going to — prison?”
“It’d be one way to keep him in check. Realistically, we could put him on ice for ninety days for assaulting a police officer, but he didn’t get that far. Anyway I didn’t write it up that way. The judge’ll probably fine him for drunk and disorderly, maybe a week shoveling out the stables at Mounted if he’s hungover when he hears the case.”
“Thank you, Zag. If I thought you were all cop I wouldn’t have asked the favor.”
“Don’t bank on that. Jerry’s the Hindenburg waiting for a spark.”
“But you will try to look out for him?”
He blew air. “The Ruby’s on my way home. I can use a drink after a hard day snaring saboteurs.”
“Maybe if he hangs around you long enough some of the nice guy will rub off on him.”
“I heard that last part,” Canal said, when he hung up.
“What’s it to you?” He was sore at himself, but the big sergeant was a fat target.
“Not a thing, L.T. Maybe you should hire a press agent and get the Free Press off your neck.” He smelled one of his thick black cigars — no one ever said he wasn’t a brave man — and put a match to it, clouding the air with the stench of boiling bedpans. “This Grabowksi dame must be some tomato.”
“I was late finding it out. If I were any kind of detective there wouldn’t be any Jerry Dugan in the picture.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. I dumped a month’s salary on forty shares in Hupmobile.”
Two weeks went by, measured in brawl bustings, barren stakeouts, and a honey of a double murder over a black-alley tire sale gone bad; not a saboteur to the credit of the fearsome Four Horsemen of the Racket Squad. Zagreb got a picture postcard from Shirley in San Francisco, the jumping-off point before the Aleutians (if the War Department wanted to keep that a secret it shouldn’t have stressed their importance in press releases). He dropped in on the Ruby Lounge a half dozen times, hovering in the background over a glass while Dugan tried to catch up with Chester “Lungs” Nelson, who according to McReary had recorded four sides with Duke Ellington, then got the sack for pulling a knife on the Duke in an artistic dispute, landing him back in Detroit. No direct contact with Dugan, who’d forked over fifty bucks to the county for the tussle at the bar and seemed to be minding his P’s and Q’s. Anyway he was nursing his beers.
Detective Burke, a big man by any standards that didn’t include Canal, braced Zagreb by the five-gallon coffeemaker that had flown across the Atlantic with Lindbergh in ’27, stabbing a hairy forefinger at a pre-war Duesenberg advertised in the News for four hundred dollars. “We can swing that, between us four,” Burke said. “I bet we get ’em down to three-fifty.”
“Just what’s your beef with the Chrysler?” The lieutenant dropped two cubes of something that wasn’t sugar into his cup and stirred it with an iron spoon that turned reddish brown when he drew it out.
“It looks like a chamber pot and you can smoke half a pack of Luckies waiting for it to accelerate after you stomp on the pedal. Other than that it’s swell.”
“You want to drive a kraut car on a public street with U-boats sinking our convoys?”
“We can paint over the insignia and call it a Liberty Car.”
Zagreb drank coffee. “Let’s just hold off on handing the commish a shovel to bury us with.”
McReary entered the squad room as Burke steamed out. The young third-grader looked rakish as usual, with his hat tilted on his prematurely bald head. “Who spit in Burksie’s soup? He looks even uglier than always.”
“I wasn’t listening. Got an aspirin?”
“Nope. Hungover?”
“Too much swing. I don’t know how you stand it.”
“I turn down the volume on the Philco. No juke joints for me. I get in my eight hours and punch in fresh as a daisy.”
“You’ll grow out of it.”
The toilet flushed down the hall and Canal came in with the racing form under his arm. “Burke tell you his brainstorm?” he asked the lieutenant.
“Yeah. Got an aspirin?”
The big man shook his head. “I told him you wouldn’t go for it. Next week he’ll be asking for a Jap Zero. Hungover?”
“Why does everybody ask that? I heard ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ three times this week. Makes me want to puke, puke, puke.”
“Mr. First Nighter. You can’t go wrong with Guy Lombardo.”
Zagreb started going through drawers belonging to unoccupied desks. He found girlie magazines, old numbers of local papers folded to sports and crossword puzzles, an enema tube attached to a hot water bottle, an unopened package of Trojans, and cartridges rolling around loose. At length he came upon an Anacin tin, but it was empty. He ran his finger around the inside and sucked on it. “I’ll swap either one of you a personal day for the next watch at the Ruby.”
Canal said, “Include me out. One wah-wah and I’m suspended for unnecessary use of deadly force.”
McReary said, “What would I do with a day off? I got just enough gas stamps to get halfway out on the Belle Isle Bridge.”
“I’ll remember you monkeys when they kick me upstairs.”
Canal grinned around his cigar. “Okay if I don’t start sweating till 1960?”
The speaker mounted on the wall crackled constantly between radio transmissions that had nothing to do with them. Now the soporific dispatcher came on to summon cars to an address Zagreb knew on Hastings.
“That’s the Ruby,” he said.
Canal jerked his chin at McReary. “Burksie does all his sulking by his locker. That’s where he parks his flask. Tell him we got a homicide.”
By day the nightclub looked as empty as the squad room, chairs upended on all the tables; the tobacco-and-liquor reek was a little more pronounced. A fat, nicotine-stained manager Burke recognized from his mug shots conducted them to an upstairs hallway, where they were met by the first officers on the scene. One looked too young for military service. His partner was a paunchy grayhead who’d obviously been called up out of retirement. If the draft continued, the department would be excavating them from Mt. Elliott Cemetery.
“Looks open and shut, Lieutenant.” Grayhead jerked a thumb toward the door behind him. “We got the body and the perp.”
Zagreb asked if the detective division was recruiting uniforms that season.