Grayhead looked confused. “No, sir.”
“Just curious. If you boys are opening and shutting cases now, this trip wasn’t necessary. There’s a war on, you know. Gasoline is blood.”
“Yes, sir.” The response was disgruntled.
The youngster saluted smartly.
“Save it for MacArthur. Who’s the subject?”
The junior officer produced a neat notebook. “Gerald Dugan, no middle. White male, age twenty-six. Says he’s a musician.”
“You were right not to take his word for it. What else?”
Notebook. “The vie. Griselda Rose Simone, Negro female, age twenty, according to the manager. Contusions on the throat, tongue extended, body still warm. Parallel longitudinal scars on the abdomen, possibly nail marks. Naked. Sex crime, maybe. That’s speculation, sir. I’m not a detective.”
“Can’t think why anyone’d want to be. Stick around, both of you.” He opened the door.
The Ruby kept a bedroom for the manager to rest when the accounts didn’t balance before dawn; that was the official explanation, but liquor and munitions weren’t the only businesses in town. There was an iron-framed bed and a little sitting area to break the ice over a bottle of bonded. Jerry Dugan was sitting there in his undershirt and pegtop slacks with the bottle in one hand. His hair needed his ivory comb and gravity had pulled at his youthful features. Zagreb transferred his attention from him to the unclothed woman on the bed.
The singer wouldn’t be gyrating on any more bandstands. She lay lewdly spread-eagled, her evening gown, lacy underthings, and gold-painted heels on the floor and her eyes rolled up toward the low ceiling. The kid hadn’t exaggerated the rest. Strangled bodies didn’t look as glamorous in the real world as they did in movies. Her tongue had sought escape from the constriction of her throat and the deep purple lacerations to the left of her navel looked as if they’d been left by a puma.
“Jesus.” McReary crossed himself.
“I think He knows already.” The lieutenant didn’t bother checking for a pulse. He returned to Dugan, snatched the bottle from his hand, held it out for Canal to take, and inspected both sets of fingernails. Then he slapped the trumpeter’s face methodically, forehand and backhand. Dugan groaned and tried to stare at the back of his own skull. The slapping stopped and his chin sank back onto his chest.
“Gone as the Charleston,” Zagreb said. “Let’s talk to the manager.”
McReary fetched him. The man looked annoyed. “I run a decent place. One curfew beef, two solicitation complaints. I canned the girls. I can’t be everyplace at once.”
“I guess that’s why you made bail last time. What happened?”
“Search me. They came early to rehearse a number, they said. They wanted to surprise Red Lot, so they asked to do it up here till it was ready. I trust people, that’s my problem. They’re up here ten minutes, then I hear screaming. I thought it was a jump tune at first. I got a tin ear. By the time I ran up to check, everything was what you see.”
“Dugan drunk when he came in?” Zagreb asked.
“Well, he wasn’t bouncing off walls. You can’t always tell with a musician. I didn’t have any problem with him buying a bottle. To loosen up, he said.”
“Okay, beat it.”
“No racket stuff here,” Canal said when the manager beat it. “Kick it over to Homicide?”
“An ox like Osprey would just tie it with a cord and hand it to the prosecutor.”
Burke said, “What’s wrong with that?”
“Ten minutes isn’t much time for Dugan to drink himself half into a coma and claw up and strangle a healthy girl.”
“Manager could be wrong about the time.” McReary kept his gaze away from his corpse. He was looking a little gray. “You said yourself two drinks and Dugan’s in Oz.”
“Body’s still warm. Also his nails are clean. No skin or blood under ’em to match the claw marks on her belly. It’s a swell setup, but they worked too fast.”
Canal flicked ash off his cigar. “Who’s they?”
Someone tapped at the door. Zagreb opened it on the young uniform. “Band’s downstairs, Lieutenant. Send ’em home?”
“No. I’ll talk to them downstairs.”
“Holy smokes.” Red Lot, scarlet and sweating in a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt, mopped his face and neck with a silk handkerchief the size of a tablecloth. “Grizzy? Holy smokes.”
“Yeah.” Zagreb had asked the Red Hots to sit, and they’d taken their usual seats on the bandstand, Lot behind his drums. The lieutenant stood before them like a conductor while McReary and Canal straddled chairs they’d taken from tables on the club floor. Burke remained upstairs with Dugan and the corpse. “How did she and Dugan get along?”
“Okay, I guess,” Lot said. “I mean, I don’t let arguments get out of hand and I got a policy against dating inside the band. That’s asking for trouble. But those two never gave me worries either way. They was friendly enough, no more.”
“She have a fella?”
“She was up to her hips in stage-door Johnnies every night, but she didn’t encourage ’em, or any of us either. Just between us, I think she batted left.” The bandleader struck a rimshot off his snare. A nervous chuckle rippled through the band.
“Cut that out. This isn’t Kay Kyser. We got a dead girl upstairs.”
“Sorry.” Lot laid aside his sticks.
“The manager of this joint says Dugan and Miss Simone told him they were rehearsing a number they wanted to surprise you with. You know anything about that?”
“Which one said that?”
The lieutenant looked at the fat man leaning on his forearms on the bar. “Dugan,” the manager said.
“He was pulling your leg,” Lot said. “What do I always say about duets, boys?”
The band raised their voices in chorus. “ ‘If I wanted most of you to sit on your hands, I’d put you in the audience and save a buck.’ ” The clarinetist added a fillip at the end, lowering his instrument quickly when Zagreb glared at him.
Red Lot nodded, pleased with the harmony. “I guess they cooked up that excuse to play another kind of duet. Maybe I got her wrong, or maybe she made an exception for bad horn men.”
“Why’d you keep him on, he was so bad?”
“Services snapped up all the good ones. Anyway, Lungs likes the kid, and Lungs is what packs ’em in here every night.”
Zagreb looked at the colored trumpeter, who took up every inch of his chair, with his collar spread and a gold chain around his thick neck from which dangled a tiny gold crucifix. Chester Nelson nodded. “He’s okay. I popped off a lot when I was his age. He’ll grow out of it, but he’ll never be no horn player.”
“Did you grow out of it?”
“I guess you mean that mixup with Ellington. There wasn’t no knife, I don’t know how that got started. Just yellin’, boss, that’s all. It was his outfit, so it was me that left.” He touched the crucifix with one of his big meaty hands as if to swear on it.
“Where’ve you been the last hour?”
Lungs’s eyes widened. “Sportree’s. We always drop in there before a gig, to oil up.”
“Who’s we?”
“Us.” He swept a hand around the bandstand.
“All of you?” Sportree’s was a Negro bar.
The trumpeter grinned broadly. “They’re all honorary coloreds when they’re with me.”
“Speak for yourself,” said one of the men in the trombone section. “I’m temperance.”
Zagreb asked him to stand. He was only an inch taller than when sitting, a hollow-cheeked shrimp with arms no bigger around than copper pipe. “Sit down. You couldn’t strangle a chipmunk.”
“You ain’t exactly Tarzan yourself, copper.”
“I said sit down. You want us to frisk you for muggles?”
The man sat down. McReary got up and tugged on Zagreb’s coattails, gesturing for him to bend down. He whispered in his ear. The lieutenant straightened, smiling sourly.