“Can I open up now?” The fat manager blew his nose. The dust they’d stirred up had set all of them sneezing.
“What’d we miss?” Zagreb asked McReary.
The third-grader shrugged and opened his mouth, but a grinding of gears and clanging of metal from outside drowned him out.
“Garbage day!” The lieutenant ran for the stairs.
A prehistoric Mack truck was pulling away from the alley behind the building, its chain drive chattering, when they came out. Burke, moving faster than any of the others had ever seen him, lunged after it and leapt aboard the running board, pounding on the door with his shield in his fist. The driver braked suddenly, almost throwing him off.
By the time they climbed down from the truck bed, the squad was plastered with coffee grounds, potato skins, and sundry other matter best left a mystery; but Zagreb was grinning, holding a long wooden implement in a hand wrapped in a handkerchief.
“What is it?” asked McReary.
Canal was beaming too. “Before your time, rook. We shut this place down the first time in ’37 for gambling. That’s one of the rakes the dealers used to scrape the cash off the tables.” He pointed to the wooden teeth, stained dark and still glistening. “That what I think it is?”
“Griselda Simone’s blood type, or it’s back to the beat for me,” Zagreb said. “And somebody’s prints on the other end.”
The fire door to the Ruby Lounge banged shut. The lock snapped. The manager had been standing in the doorway. Zagreb barked at McReary, who launched himself around the end of the building. He came back three minutes later, panting.
“Out the front and who knows where?” he said. “Tub of lard like him, who’da thought he could run like that?”
“Call box on the corner,” Zagreb told Canal, who went that way, fishing for his key. The lieutenant smacked the young detective’s shoulder. “No sweat, Mac. What’s he going to do, join the Navy?”
When the man from the lab called Zagreb, he sounded put out. “That set of prints you gave me didn’t match the ones on the rake.”
“They belong to the manager. I got them from his file.”
“Latents on the handle were too small. Ten to one they’re a woman’s.”
“I’ll get back to you.” He held up a hand, staying the others from questions, and started going through desk drawers: That wartime habit of plopping himself down in front of any old deserted workstation was getting to be a pain. Finally he found the picture postcard he was looking for and peered at it closely. “Your eyes are younger, Mac. What’s it say?” He handed it over, pointing at the postmark.
McReary studied it, passed the card back. “St. Clair Shores.”
“Caption says San Francisco.”
“She was pulling your leg. Friend of yours?”
“Cops don’t have friends.” He picked up the receiver again and asked the long-distance operator for the War Department.
Shirley Grabowksi had been reported AWOL when she failed to report in California for deployment to Alaska. The fingerprints the War Department sent over matched the prints on the handle of the wooden rake that bore Griselda Simone’s blood type on the teeth. The information was given to state police throughout the Great Lakes region and the FBI.
Chester “Lungs” Nelson was brought in, and when Lieutenant Zagreb effectively told him everything that had happened from Lungs’s first contact with the WAC, offered no resistance. Disapproving of a “sister” fraternizing with a white man — it had been going on for some time, without Red Lot’s notice — he’d brought the affair to Dugan’s girlfriend’s attention, but swore he’d had nothing to do with the murder. Zagreb was inclined to believe him, especially after Canal had offered to break the trumpeter’s jaw in so many places he’d never be able to blow so much as a kazoo. With Shirley still at large, that was where the matter rested until a distant cousin of the fat manager’s turned him in to the Toledo Police for failure to pay rent on the use of his couch.
Ohio extradited. The manager, who’d put on more weight while he was shut in, confessed to doping Jerry Dugan’s bottle and looking the other way when Shirley Grabowski entered the Ruby and went upstairs. Under what the News and the Times called “fierce questioning” and the Free Press called “the Horsemen’s brutal third degree,” he insisted that he thought she was planning only to rough up the girl once Dugan was in no condition to prevent her; like Lungs, he hated race-mixing and was interested solely in employing a woman’s jealousy toward the solution.
Burke, puffing heavily with his shirtsleeves rolled up to his armpits, said, “What’d you think the rake was for, friendly game of craps?”
“She didn’t carry it up. It was in the room. The girl who comes in to clean uses it to hold the door open when she sweeps up. I never even missed it till it showed up in the trash. Why do you think I panicked? The broad went out the fire escape; she must’ve ditched it in the can in the alley. I see the body, I’m going to say anything? I already got a record.”
The story had everything the fact-detective magazines needed to shove Fifth Column spies off the covers. Shirley’s picture went up in the post office next to Tokyo Rose’s, and Walter Winchell broadcast her description on the radio. When Max Zagreb let himself into his apartment after a night at the Roxy, he’d just seen her face in a newsreel, so when he pulled the chain-switch on the light and saw her sitting in his shabby armchair, he thought at first he was daydreaming.
“Hello, Shirl How’s life on the lam?” He threw his keys on a table.
“Not as glamorous as advertised. A cop ought to have a bobby-pin-proof lock.”
“What’s a cop got to steal?” He saw she’d traded the trim uniform for a print dress that might have fit her before she lost weight, and her ankles looked thick above shoes with chunky heels. Her shoulder bob needed a good hairdresser and her face was haggard. She’d been right about the military frock; it had given her a kind of beauty she’d never really had.
But then, he was looking at a murderess now. He kept an eye on the handbag she was clutching in her lap.
“Can you see your way clear to mixing me a rickey?” she asked. “I haven’t been in a bar in weeks. People get a drink in them and try to collect the bounty. It’s up to a thousand now. Be twice as much if I were a man.”
“I never saw the sense in that. Women are more dangerous. No Coke in the icebox, sorry.” He took out his flask, seeing her hands flinch on the bag when he went for his pocket.
She hesitated, then pried one loose to accept the flask. As she grasped it, he snatched the bag from her other hand. She made a feeble gesture after it, then relaxed as he undid the clasp and removed a small semiautomatic. “For me?” he said.
“You did a lousy job keeping Jerry out of trouble. But no.” She opened the flask, swigged, coughed. “Needs the Coke.”
“Be happy with the hospitality. What kind of friend shoots herself in a friend’s house? Ever try scrubbing blood and brains out of mohair?”
“I was saving it for later, in case you tried to arrest me. I came to explain. Homely girl thinks she landed a cute guy—”
“He said you’re a knockout.”
“I don’t believe you, but thanks.”
“Nuts to that. He wasn’t even happy with you when he said it. Some guys don’t like being mothered.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve got a mother. She doesn’t like me much. Drink up and let’s go downtown.” He slid the pistol into his side pocket.