Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 57, No. 1 & 1, January/February 2012

Big Band Loren D. Estleman

Shirley Grabowski had always been one of those women the tabloids called handsome, when a picture accompanied the story and they couldn’t smuggle “beauty” past the readers. Her jaw was too square, her nose mannish, and she could never find sunglasses to fit her wide-set eyes. But that was before the war, before she joined the Women’s Army Corps. The WAC uniform, with its tailored jacket and skirt and overseas cap set at a rakish angle on her strawberry blonde head, brought everything together. She was, Max Zagreb admitted to himself ruefully, a dish.

He told her as much. She rolled a padded shoulder and pumped the straw in her gin rickey. “It’s the government-issue frock: Makes men horny, like those Scarlett O’Hara costumes bridesmaids wear. It’d make Olive Oyl look like Lana Turner.”

“Now you’re just fishing.” The Racket Squad lieutenant waited until the 4-F sourpuss in the paper hat turned his back to the counter, then unscrewed his flask and freshened their Cokes. It was past curfew for everyone but cops and their companions. They were the only customers in the Rexall, and the man wanted to close. He’d switched off the radio in the middle of Lowell Thomas to hurry them on their way. “Speaking of bridesmaids, I’ve heard scuttlebutt.”

“You and your stoolies,” she said. “Let’s hold off on rice rations till the Axis goes belly up. If Jerry gets me in the family way I won’t get to see London.”

“Neighborhood’s gone downhill since the Luftwaffe moved in. How is old Jerry? I haven’t seen him since the three-legged sack race on Belle Isle.”

“Quit your kidding. You never met. You will, if you do me the eensy-weensy favor I dragged you down here to ask.”

“What’s my end?”

“Old times’ sake. You threw me over for a bottle blonde in the Club 666 right in the middle of ‘Five O’Clock Jump.’ The way I see it, you owe me a good turn.”

“The blonde nicked me for a fin to make change to tip the girl in the powder room and never came back. I figure I paid my debt to society.”

“Sap. There aren’t any restroom attendants in the 666.”

“So I found out when I went looking for her. Okay, I was a drip. How do I square myself?”

“I ship out next week. I want you to keep Jerry out of trouble while I’m away.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The musician kind.”

“Sour notes?”

“He never blows ’em. He plays second trumpet with Red Lot’s Red Hots, mixed group with a steady gig at the Ruby Lounge on Hastings.”

“I know Red. Vice pulled him in a muggles rap couple of months back.”

“Does that sort of thing bother you?”

“It bothers Vice. Those boys sit with their knees together just like their mamas told ’em. Me, I like hooch. I never get in the way of a fellow and his way to hell, so long as it doesn’t involve the rackets.”

“Drugs isn’t a racket?”

“Only the supply side. I don’t want to know what Satchmo sounds like on Juicy Fruit and orange Nehi.”

“I don’t mean that kind of trouble. Jerry’s a hothead, goes with the job: It takes a few hours to wind down from a good session, and when he gets a few drinks in him, he’d pick a fight with Patton’s Third Army.”

“I did my bit for Prohibition, Shirk I’ve got the lumps to prove it.”

“I don’t begrudge him a bender now and then. Two sets in the Ruby would turn a teetotaler like Henry Ford into a Class-A sot. I just don’t want him to catch a fist in the throat some night. He’s got his heart set on a slot with the Casa Loma Orchestra, and they aren’t hiring horn men with busted pipes.”

“If he likes to fight more than he likes to blow, he should enlist.”

“He tried. Glenn Miller said he’d give him an audition for his army band if he joined up, but a crummy doctor at the Light Guard armory said he had a heart murmur and washed him out.”

Zagreb had one of those, too: it kept murmuring Don’t go. Aloud he said, “I can’t babysit him for the duration. The commissioner won’t okay the cover charge.”

“Well, what can you do?”

“Give him an even break if he winds up in the tank.”

“Isn’t that just going by the book?”

“You know, I never saw a book. I thought they’d hand out copies with the shield, but there was a depression on and I guess they had to save on the printing bill.”

“You know what I think? There isn’t a book.”

“You’d make a good detective.”

She took out her straw and slurped liquid off the end. By then it was all gin. “I don’t even know if I’ll make a good WAC. I just didn’t want to pound sheet metal at Chrysler.”

“Guess you’ll know when you get to London.”

“Not London. I can’t tell you where they’re sending me, but tea and crumpets aren’t in it. Can you at least promise me you’ll look in on him from time to time? Maybe put the fear of God in him when he steps over the line?”

“What’s the skinny, Shirl? Afraid he’ll sit under the apple tree with a bottle blonde while you’re in the Aleutians?”

She paled. “How did you—? Forget I said that. I fell for a musician. Don’t you think I know where to cut my losses? Jerry’s a good egg. All he need’s a woman who cares enough to trim some of that bark off him. Since it can’t be me, I thought I’d draft the Detroit Police Department.”

He lit a Chesterfield. The counterman sighed but kept mum. Black marketers had stuck him up three times for penicillin before he started letting cops order burgers on the cuff. He turned away to flush the soda taps. “You’re still aiming high,” Zagreb said. “I trained on tommy-gunners and axe murderers. Playing Dutch uncle to trumpeters ought to come with combat pay.”

She smiled; he remembered she had horse teeth, but now she looked like Katharine Hepburn. Her fingers brushed the back of his hand where it rested on the Formica. “Thanks, Zag. I knew I could count on you.”

“I didn’t—” he said; but she was giving him details.

As they moved toward the door, Paper Hat ran up the sale, sniffed their glasses, scowled, and plunged them into warm soapy water.

The Ruby Lounge had been padlocked once for operating after curfew, but the lieutenant in charge of that detail was a reasonable man with a wife who liked furs and Florida, so it had reopened immediately. It was in full swing when Zagreb dropped in, flashed his shield at the bouncer, and plowed his way to the bar. The atmosphere was so dense he thought it would hold its shape after the walls fell in, a perfect cube of noise and smoke.

Red Lot’s Red Hots crowded the bandstand twelve pieces strong. Lot, whose facial congestion matched his thatch of flame-colored hair, leaned heavily on his bass drum, propelling the band through a high-test version of “Let Me Off Uptown.” What the girl singer, a light-skinned Negro, lacked in lung power she made up for in body movement; the gyrations of her long slender form in a skin-tight evening dress were incendiary and violated the city ordinance against lewd and lascivious activity. But that one had been passed before a war that had put many things in a different perspective. In any case, that was Vice’s headache. Zagreb ordered a double rye and leaned his back against the bar to watch Jerry Dugan blow his horn.

The Racket Squad lieutenant was tone deaf, but he could tell that Shirley Grabowski’s fella was out of his depth next to the heavyset Negro blasting away at the first trumpet; that party climbed the scale to the ear-shattering crescendo with seeming ease, with Dugan stumbling behind in sweaty confusion. Evidently, all the best men were in uniform or performing with the USO — or, as in the case of the silver-templed colored player, exempted by age from service until storm troopers poured into Paradise Valley.

Zagreb had no beef with the trombones, reeds, vibes, and piano; but his taste in music began and ended with Bing Crosby.

“Let Me Off Uptown” ended the set, of course. It would have been anti-climactic to follow it with anything but an air raid. The clientele thinned out — entertainment was the draw, not the watered-down black market booze — and Zagreb found pace to sidle up next to Jerry Dugan as he called for a Schlitz.

“I always heard you musicians fueled up on ethyl,” the lieutenant said by way of opening the conversation.

“I promised my girl I’d ride the wagon a while.” The trumpeter was a good-looking kid and he knew it. He focused on this reflection behind the bar and smoothed back a sandy lock with an ivory comb. His band jacket was cut to call attention to his narrow waist and square shoulders.

“Tell me which wagon, it lets you blow like that.” The department oath came with a license to lie.

“You should hear me when we’re jamming. Out in the open I got to hang back or sweep these bush leaguers out the door.”

It was going to be impossible to keep this boy out of trouble. “That other trumpeter won’t sweep easy.”

“Well, Lungs is an institution.”

The way he said the name indicated his listener should know it. He made a note to consult McReary. The detective third-grade was the youngest man on the squad and presumably up on current music. “We have a mutual friend. Shirley Grabowski?”

“Shirley’s that girl I told you about.” Dugan introduced himself and reached across his body to offer his left hand. Fritz Kreisler, the violinist, protected his bow hand that way, it was said; but Kreisler needn’t fear the return of better musicians when the war was over.

“Max Zagreb.”

“How do you know Shirley?”

“We met on a double date. She was out with some loser.” No sense naming the loser.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked into the scarlet boozy face of Red Lot. “Hey, there, Lieutenant. How’s the boy?”

The bartender had a highball all ready for the bandleader. It wasn’t his first or he wouldn’t be so chummy. They’d barely spoken while he was being released from the marijuana lockup. Before Zagreb could frame a suitable response, Red was gone with his glass, glad-handing his way from table to table.

Dugan said, “Lieutenant. You on leave?”

“Can’t get a pass out of the commissioner.”

“Oh. Cop.” There was no way to say the phrase that sounded friendly.

“Off duty tonight. Only raid polka joints when I’m on.”

“Come to think of it I heard her say she knew a cop. She send you to check up on me?”

“You need checking up on?”

“Shirley thinks so. She don’t like to see a man enjoying himself. I’d trade her in for the sport model if she weren’t a knockout.”

He was liking Dugan better and better — for the draft. “A lot of mugs that like to pop off sometimes could stand having a knockout like her around. I was a hellraiser myself till my old watch captain took me in hand, and he was ugly as a bag of bricks.”

Dugan tipped up his bottle and didn’t set it down until it gurgled empty. “Well, you can tell her Jerry-boy’s all grown up. She can serve donuts to dogfaces and not give me another thought. Maybe a V-mail now and again to remind me to wear rubbers when it rains. What’re you drinking?” The beer was having its effect. Like most mean drunks, he was on his way after the second round.

“Rye.”

“Make it two, Ace.” Dugan slapped the bar.

The bartender, a big Pole who looked as if he’d started out juggling short blocks at Dodge Main, set them up. “Name’s Stan. Stanislaus to you, Bugle Boy.”

Dugan put back the shot with a jerk, then decided to get mad. Zagreb caught his fist on the cock and twisted his arm behind his back.

“Hey, hey! That’s the money arm.” The trumpeter’s voice was shrill.

“You should’ve thought of that before you tried to break it on a bartender named Stanislaus.” He fumbled out the folder with his shield and showed it to that individual, who nodded and straightened up from the sawed-off every mixologist in the Arsenal of Democracy kept under the bar. “You going to behave?”

“Yeah, sure. Jesus.”

The lieutenant let go, and was ready when Dugan spun around leading with his other fist. He ducked the blow and lifted the boy off his feet in a firearm’s carry when the follow-through put him in position. He gripped Dugan’s wrists, clamped his other arm around his legs, and opened a path through the crowd of gawkers toward the door. “Fireworks over, folks,” he said. “Your tax dollars at work. Be sure and buy bonds.”

“Slow news day.” Sergeant Canal folded The Detroit Times. “You should tell a guy when you moonlight as a bouncer. You won’t let me drive a cab.”

“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.

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.

“My colleague reminds me Sportree’s is only a five-minute walk from here. There’s a fire escape out back, so the manager didn’t have to see anything. Any of you guys step out for a leak?”

Lungs said, “Me. I got weak kidneys. I wasn’t gone three minutes.”

“That sound about right?” The other musicians shrugged. “Anyone go to parochial school?” A few nods. “Okay, you can explain it to the rest. We’re checking your nails.”

Canal went without being asked. He was the least likely member of the squad to encounter resistance. After a few minutes he stepped off the bandstand. “Clean, L.T. Of blood and matter, anyways. Some of these boys could use a lesson in hygiene. Boy on vibes chews his to the elbow.” He spoke low.

Zagreb kept his volume down as well. “What about Lungs?”

“Whitest thing about him. He don’t leave his barber’s without a manicure.”

“We can eliminate the slobs. The rest had plenty of time to tidy up.” He stared at the sergeant. “You okay?”

“Fine ’n’ dandy.” It sounded slurred.

Zagreb frowned, then raised his voice to the band. “Leave your names and addresses with Detective McReary, and stick close to home. No show tonight. The place is closed.”

“Hey!” The manager stiffened behind the bar.

The lieutenant had already seen his nails. He wouldn’t ask the man to make him a sandwich, but it was just dirt. “Tell it to the marines. No, wait — they placed the Ruby off limits.”

Red Lot struck another one off the rim. The fat man flushed and left the room.

The uniforms took Dugan down to 1300, Detroit Police Headquarters, with Zagreb’s instructions to book him for suspicion; the trumpeter negotiated the stairs with rubber ankles and an officer holding up each arm. In a little while the medical examiner showed up, humming as he ascended the stairs. The squad repaired to the Chrysler, where the lieutenant touched Burke’s arm behind the wheel. “You dating a meter maid?”

“I’m riding the fidelity train just now. Wife found a cocktail napkin with a phone number in my pocket. Why a meter maid?”

“They aren’t making new cars anymore. You strip those gears, you’ll need a scooter.”

“Be an improvement.” But he worked the clutch gently.

“Sawbuck says it’s Lot,” Canal said. “See how red and sweaty he was? Like he just went ten rounds with a fire escape.”

Zagreb said, “He always looks like that. My dough’s on Lungs. Those hands could throttle a coconut.”

“Nuts,” said McReary. “Famous people don’t do murder.”

“Tell it to John Wilkes Booth.” Burke flashed his Clark Gable grin at a pair of nurses in a crosswalk. One smiled back. Her companion grabbed her wrist and jerked it like a leash.

“He was just famous on account of he bumped Lincoln.”

“He was already boffo box-office in the Raymond Massey picture.” Canal blew cigar exhaust out of his window.

Not enough. The lieutenant rolled down his, preferring the street odor. It was garbage day. “Anybody can duck out of a dive like Sportree’s without being noticed, even a big shot like Lungs. Maybe he objected to Dugan messing with a colored girl.”

Burke said, “So why not kill Dugan?”

“He’d be just as sore at them both. Framing Dugan punished him too and took Lungs off the hook for Simone.”

“Lucky for him Dugan got a snootful,” Burke said.

“It didn’t take much. He’s an amateur drinker.”

“So let’s lean on Lungs,” Canal said.

“Maybe wait to hear from the M.E.” McReary studied law nights. “He’ll get the size of the killer’s hands from the marks on the neck. You don’t have to be Captain Marvel to choke a dame. That midget on trombone could’ve done it if he had time.”

“This dame looked plenty healthy on the bandstand,” Zagreb said. “Let’s drop in on Lungs.”

McReary said, “He might not be home yet.”

“Even better.” The Lieutenant opened the glove compartment and took out a ring of skeleton keys.

Chester “Lungs” Nelson kept an apartment on Erskine, above a rib joint they could smell the moment they turned into the block. When they stepped out of the car, Canal stumbled on the curb and caught himself noisily against a cluster of trash cans. Zagreb stared. “You drunk?”

“Just a slug, Zag, honest.” The sergeant slid the bottle they’d taken from Dugan out of his coat. Zagreb grabbed it, unscrewed the cap, and sniffed at the contents. “Back in the car,” he said.

“What about Lungs?” Burke asked.

“Lungs can wait. We’re going to a drugstore.”

The nearest drugstore happened to be the one where Zagreb had drunk gin rickeys with Shirley Grabowski. The soda jerk in the paper hat wasn’t on duty, but their business was with the pharmacist, a chubby sixty with humorous eyes who heard his request and said, “Don’t you boys have your own chemists?”

“Clear up in Lansing,” Zagreb said. “Two weeks’ minimum. An hour’d be better.”

“Well, I don’t know. There’s so many possibilities, and a different test for each. I’m a little rusty. Mostly I just fill little pill bottles from big ones.”

“Start with all the common stuff. We’re not looking for Fu Manchu.”

The man took the bottle and said he’d do what he could. The Four Horsemen stopped at the counter long enough for Canal to gulp down three cups of coffee, then returned to the squad room and waited for the phone to ring.

“How do you do it? You just yank the handle and the pinball machine does the rest.” Burke shook his head. “Dope in the bottle proves Dugan was set up just like you said.”

“Unless he killed the girl first, then doped himself to make it play that way,” Zagreb said. “But the toilet’s on the ground floor, so where’d he clean his nails without the manager seeing him?”

“In on it?” suggested McReary.

“Or did it all himself, but why?”

“Same reason as Lungs,” Burke said. “He don’t mix his whites with his coloreds. He provided the bottle, didn’t he?”

Zagreb said, “It was waiting in the room for the next customer. Anyone who knew what they were up to could’ve snuck in, spiked the booze, and went back out onto the fire escape to wait for it to work. I’m eliminating Dugan again. No motive.”

“It wasn’t Lungs.”

Everyone looked at Canal, whose voice sounded like a motor trying to start. His broad face was pale and shiny: The cure was worse than the condition. “That’s too long to be away from the band at Sportree’s and still have time to clean up. Somebody would’ve noticed he’d been in the can a long time.”

“Sure, they’d all cover for him,” Burke said. “He’s their star attraction.”

The phone rang. Zagreb took the call, listened, said thanks, and forked the receiver. “Chloral hydrate. Knockout drops. There was enough in the bottle to stun a moose.”

“Lucky it was Canal,” Burke said.

The lieutenant remained seated with the candlestick phone in his lap and his hands resting on it. “What’s good for a search warrant?”

Burke said, “You mean a judge we ain’t ticked off lately? Blake just got back from Canada. He was gone a month hunting bears.”

“Tail, you mean. We gave him a pass on that underage intern last Christmas. Time to collect.” Zagreb started dialing.

Canal rubbed his temples. “What we looking for?”

“I’m not just sure, but it’ll be nasty.”

They tossed the Ruby Lounge from top to bottom, starting with the murder room — minus a corpse now — and finishing in the basement, a dusty monument to Prohibition with what was left of a copper still after the last scrap drive, empty Old Log Cabin crates, and buckets of fusel oil. Canal, recovering now, said he could get up a swell victory party from that alone. But nothing they found was evidence in a homicide investigation.

“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.

“Whatever happened to old times’ sake?”

“You killed a girl, Shirley.”

“A woman always blames the other woman, you ought to know that. I’m sorry I did it, though. I didn’t plan the — the mutilation, but when I saw that rake—” She shuddered. “Anyway, it wasn’t her fault. Who could resist Jerry?” She must have read the answer on his face because she changed the subject again. “What do you hear from him, by the way?”

“Red Lot gave him the axe. Not for what happened. A better trumpeter got sent home from the Pacific with a hickory leg. Somebody told me Jerry joined the Coast Guard. They’re not so particular about heart murmurs. If he’s got the brains God gave a cricket he’ll throw the horn overboard. He’d make a better sailor than a musician.”

“He isn’t Harry James, is he?”

“He isn’t even Harry Langdon. And he can’t drink. If it weren’t for Tojo and Hitler he’d be pumping gas in Garden City.”

“What’s the song called? ‘We’re Looking for a Guy who Plays Alto and Baritone, Doubles on the Clarinet, and Wears a Size 37 Suit’?”

“If Bing didn’t sing it, I don’t know it.”

The manager of the Ruby Lounge pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of accessory to assault and battery and drew two years in Jackson, including time tacked on for fleeing and eluding. The prosecutor decided not to press charges against Lungs Nelson, who quit Red Lot to tour with the USO, leaving him short a trumpeter. Lot lost his gig and took the band on the road to open for Jean Goldkette.

A jury rejected Shirley Grabowski’s plea of temporary insanity, based on the planning involved: the doped whiskey, the arrangement with the manager, the phony postcard to establish an alibi. Judge James Blake sentenced her to life in prison, but her lawyer won a bid for appeal. Zagreb visited her in the women’s facility at the Detroit House of Corrections, where she’d been moved pending a new trial. The matron, whose husband had deserted her for a younger woman, took pains to get her a jail uniform that fit. In it, she was, Max Zagreb admitted to himself ruefully, quite a dish.