The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

Loren D. Estleman GI Jack

From The Big Book of Jack the Ripper

Burke said, “What’s with Mac? I offered to set him up with a redhead that rooms with a blonde I got my eye on and he said it was no go.”

The detective first grade was addressing his superior, Lieutenant Max Zagreb. They were at 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters, in the fourth year of the Second World War. Detective Third Grade McReary was dimly visible in a far corner reading by the light of a gooseneck lamp.

Just like Lincoln, Zagreb thought. He said, “He’s got ambition. He’s studying for the sergeant’s exam.”

“What for? The higher you go, the less people you got to blame stuff on.”

“Do yourself a favor. Cancel the date and spend the evening with your wife for a change.”

“She’d just think I was up to something.”

Zagreb found McReary immersed to his eyebrows in books piled on the desk of an officer currently ducking sniper fire on Iwo Jima. The lieutenant slid the volume off the top of a stack, a fifty-year-old chronicle of murders in both hemispheres. A puff of desiccated paper came out when he cracked it open, making him sneeze. He snapped it shut.

“You know they’re not going to ask you this shit on the test. Burke and Hare? Them dumb Doras in the brass’ll think it’s an insurance firm.”

McReary, the bottom face on the totem pole of Detroit’s fabled Four Horsemen (the Detroit Racket Squad, to the uninitiated), slid his fedora back from his prematurely bald head. “Once you get started, it’s hard to stop. I know the Michigan Penal Code back to front; I can ace that, but they’re always looking for more. Most of these old criminal cases were cracked. If I can get a handle on how it was done, I stand to nail the orals.”

“Just so long as it don’t get in the way of the job. We got a line on a truckload of Australian kangaroo meat that Frankie Orr’s looking to pass off as South American beef docking down in Wyandotte, tonight or tomorrow night. My money says it jumps on the side of a rationing violation.” He smiled. “Jumps, get it?”

Under ordinary circumstances the junior member of the squad would chuckle at his superior’s joke. He grunted only, absorbed deeply in the Crippen poisoning case.

The telephone jangled on yet another vacant desk. It was Lieutenant Osprey with Homicide.

“Yeah, Ox,” Zagreb said.

“The name’s Oswald. I got a streetwalker carved up like a side of beef I ain’t seen since before rationing.”

“Since when is a hooker murder a Racket Squad deal?”

“Look, I’m shorthanded since D-day. If you like I can tell the papers she slept with Göring. We can recant on page eight.”

“Something tells me I’m not getting the full story. Oh, right: I’m talking to Ox Osprey, the cop who pled the Fifth seventeen times during the McHenry grand trial.”

“So I sprang a small-time bootlegger in return for a case of good Canadian for my tenth anniversary. The head of the review board shot golf with Frankie Orr the day he suspended me. It was Orr’s liquor.” The homicide lieutenant dropped his voice to a whisper. Zagreb had to press the receiver tightly to his ear to catch the words.

“Listen, we got the button tight on this one. She’s number three. All killed the same way: throat slit, stomach cut open, and her guts dumped alongside the body. I need the manpower before the press jumps in and takes page one away from Patton’s Third Army.”

“Enlighten me on how three dead hookers outscore a thousand of our boys in Europe.”

“The press is sick of troop movements and how MacArthur takes his shrimp tempura. You know how they like to get their hands into a sex murder up to their elbows.”

Zagreb took down the particulars, depressed the plunger, and called Sergeant Canal’s home number. That month the most intimidating member of the squad was living in an apartment on Michigan Avenue directly above a barbershop whose phones never seemed to stop ringing. He owed his cheap rent to a landlord who made the very good case that a little bookmaking on the side compensated for most of his clientele taking their haircuts free courtesy of the U.S. military.

“We got a name to go with the latest stiff?” he shouted above the jangling.

The lieutenant looked at his notes. “Bette Kowalski.” He spelled it. “Ox’s witnesses say she pronounced it ‘Betty,’ like Bette Davis.”

“Yeah, she was clear about that.”

“You knew her?”

“Not in the biblical sense, if that’s any of your goddamn business, Lieutenant, sir. Since she’s dead, I can tell you she was a firehose of information, depending on what we had in the kitty. We dumped over three warehouses of tires, gasoline, and fresh eggs on her word alone.”

“Firehoses have to be connected somewhere.”

“It ain’t exactly a trade secret. We could’ve turned him over a couple of dozen times, only we’d have spent the rest of the war finding out who took his place and how he operates. Plenty of time to crank him up to the Milan pen once we run Old Glory up Schicklgruber’s ass.”

“You’re saying Frankie Orr’s added pimping to his repertoire?”

“I don’t know what that is, but if it’s buying tail on the street, Frankie’s the man to see.” Canal cleared his throat, an operation similar to coal sliding down a chute. “I ain’t saying this because I need the sleep. We need to corral these bats in broad daylight.”

Zagreb had something intelligent in reply, but just then a horse came in at thirty to one and the noise level on Canal’s end made conversation impossible.

For formality’s sake, the entire squad convened in the Wayne County Morgue to get a look at the only real evidence in any case of homicide: the victim’s body naked in a pull-out tray, clay-pale except for the blue-black smile the last person she’d known had carved under her jawbone and the black cotton cross-stitches the medical examiner had used to close the incisions he’d made to examine her entrails. She’d been basted together like a made-to-order outfit for a first fitting, and from the extent of the repair work the damage had been more than substantial. She looked very young. As many stiffs as Zagreb had seen, he never got over how the brutal act of murder returned even the most jaded victims to innocence.

“You okay?” he asked McReary. “You look a little green.”

“It’s the iodoform, L.T. Ma bought it by the gallon during the influenza scare in ’19 and doused us all by the day.”

“Garlic, me,” Canal said. “I ain’t just sure if the old lady meant it for the ague or vampires.”

Lieutenant Osprey tipped back a flask, exposing the tender flesh under a jaw cut with a miter. He didn’t offer to share it with the others. “What I think? He paid his girls on the installment plan, she preferred cash-and-carry. She beefed, he cut.”

“I saw a seal blow ‘Anchors Aweigh’ on horns in the circus. I guess he thought that was thinking too.” Burke, who had a phobia against promotion, never missed a chance to take a shot at rank, with the single exception of Lieutenant Max Zagreb.

That party fired another question at Osprey just as his neck began to redden. “What about the others?”

A dilapidated notebook came out. “One colored, semipro, the other first-generation Albanian with a solicitation record as long as Errol Flynn’s dick. Three nights apart, a little over six weeks ago.”

“Why the dry spell, you figure?”

“I don’t know, but it’s a break. The press might not make the connection after all this time, but we got to sew this one up before he puts another notch on his belt.”

“He’s on a cycle.”

They looked at McReary, whose face had begun to show some normal color. “Some of these mass murderers go by phases of the moon or the zodiac or the anniversary of their mother’s death. If we can nail it down and study the behavior of known killers, we might narrow the field of suspects.”

“What the hell’s Dick Tracy Junior flapping his gums about?” Osprey demanded.

Zagreb smiled patiently. “He’s cramming for the sergeant’s exam, picking over the lush and fascinating history of crime — got it on the brain.”

“No kidding. I got my first promotion by doing my damn job.”

“And got busted drinking Frankie Orr’s booze,” Burke said.

Osprey swung his way, fists bunched at his sides. Zagreb, standing in for the League of Nations, distracted him by pressing for more details.

The other scowled, but uncrumpled his notebook and paged back, seesawing his arm as he tried to make out his own weeks-old scrawl. The first victim, Charlotte Adams, had been discovered flayed open in an alley off Grand River in the wee hours by a beat cop. A derelict found her colleague, Maria Zogu, in a trash bin behind the Albanian restaurant where she scooped up most of her clientele. Eyewitness descriptions of companions they were with when last seen were scattered and useless.

“Canal says Kowalski pounded the pavement for Frankie Orr. What about the others?”

“Indies, by all accounts. Say, maybe there’s something in that. He’s nailed down the steelhaulers’, garbage collectors’, and launderers’ unions across three counties. Maybe he’s moving in on the sex trade, making an example of the holdouts.”

“Then why Kowalski? She worked for him.”

“She wanted out.”

“Listen to the quiz kid,” Burke said. “Got an answer for everything except how to close a case on his own.”

Osprey wheeled on him. “You want to mix it up, Detective, there’s an empty tray right next door.”

Zagreb said, “Let’s leave the fighting to the boys in uniform and see where it happened.”

Bette Kowalski had shared a third-floor walkup on Erskine with a girl who said she worked a drill press at the Chrysler tank plant. Zagreb was inclined to believe her: she was a pudding-faced brunette who bore no resemblance at all to Rosie the Riveter. None of the swing-shift queens he’d known did.

“I worked days,” she said. “That way we only had to have the one bed. That’s where I found her.” She pointed at a gaunt iron-framed veteran with bare springs. “I got rid of the mattress, but I’m sleeping on the couch anyway. I told the landlady I’m moving out first chance I get.” She hugged herself, although the room was stuffy.

“Both doors locked, hall and street,” Osprey added. “Let him in, probably. All part of the job.”

Zagreb flicked his gaze at Canal, who nodded and touched the girl’s arm, steering her into a corner to ask innocuous questions out of earshot of the rest of the conversation.

“She must’ve been a mess,” Zagreb told the man from Homicide.

“If we found her on the riverfront I’d’ve thought she got washed up after getting chopped up by the propeller of the mail boat. Working behind closed doors, without interruption, the son of a bitch had all the time in the world.”

McReary said, “Ah!”

Osprey turned his head. “You said what?”

“Just ‘Ah!’ ”

“We’ll pay Frankie a visit,” Zagreb said, glancing sideways at the detective third grade.

“You need me for that?” Osprey asked.

He knew the prospect of spending time in the same room with Orr wouldn’t appeal to the man who’d accepted a case of his liquor. “We’re used to him, Ox. We’ll take it from here.”

The other was so relieved he forgot to take issue with the nickname.

“Spill it,” Zagreb said. They were sitting in the 194 °Chrysler the department had issued the squad before the auto industry turned its attention from Airflow transmissions to airplanes, Burke at his station behind the wheel, the lieutenant beside him.

McReary, sharing the back seat with Canal, blushed. “Just a hunch, when you said what Ox said about the perp having more time to finish the job because he and the victim were indoors. It reminded me of something I just read. Don’t know why I didn’t make the connection before: prostitutes cut up and left to be found, the last the worst of all because it was done in a private apartment.”

“Drop the other shoe, Baldy,” Burke said. “Some of us only squeaked through high school by sitting next to the smartest kid in class.”

“The Whitechapel murders, London, England, fall of 1888.” He glanced around at the faces turned his way, brows lifted. “Any takers?”

“I seen a movie or two,” Canal said. “Just what we needed. Didn’t have enough on the burner with saboteurs, rioters, and the black market, no sir. Let’s throw in Jack the Ripper Junior, just to ice the cake.” He crumpled his soggy cigar into a ball and threw it out the open window.

The Negro who opened the door of Frankie Orr’s forty-room house in Grosse Pointe said his employer was out.

“Where’d he be, then, Jeeves?” Canal asked. “We been to his suite in the Book-Cadillac. That butler said try here. I rolled boxcars that looked less alike.”

“I can’t tell you apart either,” said the man, without irony. “If the police can’t find him, I certainly can’t.”

A female voice called out behind him, sounding slightly soused. “Tell ’em to try the yacht club. They can scrape him off the hull with the barnacles.”

“Who was that?” asked McReary when the paneled door shut in their faces.

“Mrs. Orr,” Zagreb said. “She must’ve caught him squeezing one of his other tomatoes.”

“Well, at least we won’t be burning off gas the boys need on Okinawa.” Burke turned toward the Chrysler.

The Grosse Pointe Yacht Club was just a few blocks away, a structure of Venetian design, complete with Gothic arches and a soaring bell tower, built directly into Lake St. Clair. They parked in a sandy lot off Vernier and entered the office, where a salty manager informed them Mr. Orr’s boat could be found in slip nine.

The boat in the slip was a converted Great War minesweeper with Gloria painted on the stern. McReary said, “I thought his wife’s name was Estelle.”

“Gloria was his gun girl during Prohibition,” Zagreb said. “She reinforced a handbag with steel so it didn’t sag when he saw a cop and slipped her his rod.”

“What happened to her?”

“Making flak jackets for the air corps last I heard. Ahoy the boat!”

A man dressed as a deckhand, in canvas trousers and a striped jersey with the sleeves rolled up past his swollen biceps, came to the rail carrying a Tommy gun. “Scram, bo.”

Burke shielded his eyes. “That you, Rocks? I thought the warden had you working the jute mill in Jackson.”

“Still would be if Mr. Orr didn’t spring me legal.” The machine gun lowered. “Sorry, Detective. I thought you was somebody else.”

“I usually am. This is my lieutenant, Max Zagreb. You can call him Lieutenant. We’re here to palaver, not pinch.”

Rocks gestured with the Tommy and the Horsemen climbed a rope ladder. The boat swayed when their weight hit the deck. “She don’t draw much water,” Zagreb said.

“Mr. Orr replaced the brass with aluminum. Put in four Rolls-Royce engines so he could outrun the coast guard with a thousand gallons of Old Log Cabin in the hull.”

“Rocks left out the part about me giving up running contraband after repeal.” The new voice belonged to a slender man whose black hair gleamed at the temples under the sweatband of a yachting cap with an anchor embroidered on it in gold thread. He wore a double-breasted blazer, white duck trousers, gum soles, and a silk ascot tucked into the open collar of his shirt.

“Throat sore, Frankie?” Zagreb snatched the weapon from the deckhand and thrust it at Burke, who took it. “Ever hear of the Sullivan Act?”

Orr said, “Rocks is in the naval reserve. He’s licensed to carry it in case we run into a U-boat.”

Canal grinned around a fresh cigar. “G’wan with you. The service don’t take ex-cons.”

“They’re less picky in the merchant marines. Let’s go in the saloon.”

“Salon,” corrected Rocks. “You told me to remind you, boss.”

“It’s Captain when we’re on the water. Go swab the deck or something while I speak with these gentlemen.”

They descended a gangway into a wide cabin containing a chrome bar and an evenly tanned blonde standing behind it in a white sharkskin swimsuit. “Cocktail?”

The visitors ordered bourbon all around except for McReary, who asked for a Vernors. She mixed, served, and exited the cabin when Orr jerked his chin toward the gangway. Zagreb caught Burke admiring the creamy band of untanned skin where fabric met flesh. “Down, boy.” He stirred his glass with a finger and sucked it. “Trouble at home, skipper?”

Orr frowned. “I guess you seen Estelle. She’s got a private dick watching the hotel, so I have to smuggle in my hobbies in a dinghy on the Canadian side of the lake.”

Canal said, “Try keeping your dinghy at home.”

The lieutenant said, “You’re mellowing. In the old days you’d drop a snooper out in the middle tied to a Chevy short block.”

“Not that I ever done anything like that, but the agency’s run by a retired police inspector. You cops hang together a lot tighter than the Purple Gang ever did.”

“We’re like the Masons that way. Hear what happened to Bette Kowalski?”

“I don’t know no one by that name.”

Zagreb wobbled good bourbon around his mouth and swallowed. “It gets old: you play dumb, we get tough, you call your mouthpiece ship-to-shore, we stuff you in a torpedo tube and blow you to Windsor. Why not take it easy on our lumbago and you can play hockey some other time?”

“The Gloria’s a minesweeper, not a destroyer. She ain’t got torpedo tubes. Okay, okay,” Orr said when Canal set down his glass and started his way. “I just want you to understand I don’t run whores. The Kowalski dame kept her ear to the ground and told me when one of my joints had to stand for a raid. It gave me time to sacrifice a couple of slot machines and keep my best dealers out of the can.”

Zagreb said, “She was your department pipeline?”

“Double agent.” Canal spat a soggy piece of tobacco into an ice bucket. “You’re saying my snitch was two-timing me with the mob and the whole damn Vice Squad?”

“Not the whole squad; just Sergeant Coopersmith. He pinched her in front of God and everybody whenever he wanted scuttlebutt from the street, and after she made bail she slipped me what she overheard at headquarters. I never paid for nothing else, and if she put out for Coop or didn’t, she never said boo either way. So you can see I had as much to lose as anybody when she opened her door to that butcher,” he finished.

“Not as much as her.” McReary’s straw gurgled. He got rid of the ginger ale bottle. “When’d you see her last?”

“The night before her roommate found her gutted like a goose. I asked her wasn’t it about time the cops swept her off the street again and she said, ‘Right after I do my part for the boys in the service.’ ”

“What’d she mean by that?” Zagreb asked.

Capped teeth flashed white in the gangster’s olive-hued face. “I’m just guessing, but I don’t think she was planning to serve coffee and doughnuts at the USO.”

Zagreb studied him over his half-raised drink. “On the level, she took a serviceman back to her room that night?”

“Bette made Kate Smith look like Tokyo Rose. She bought bonds, donated to the scrap drive, and offered a discount every time she sat under the apple tree with a GI.”

“Thanks, Frankie,” the lieutenant said. “Just to show our heart’s in the right place, we’ll forget about that shipment of kangaroo meat on its way to Wyandotte. We’ll even throw in whatever you got stashed in their pouches.”

Orr flushed high on his cheekbones. “How the hell—? Oh,” he said, resuming his customary calm. “I hope you boys don’t bury her on Zug Island with the other unclaimed stiffs. That was a doozy of a going-away present she gave you.”

Back on deck, Burke returned the Thompson to Rocks. “Next time take the safety off, mug. Them underwater krauts never put theirs on.”

Back at 1300, Burke poured two fingers of Four Roses into a Dixie cup. “I ain’t George M. Cohan, but nobody’s going to sell me one of our troops is slashing hookers.”

McReary gave up on the book he was studying. “One of the theories about the Ripper was he served in India or Afghanistan. Hand-to-hand combat can do things to a man.”

Canal said, “Seems to me we paid this bill off last July during the riots. Two nutcase killers in one year?”

McReary said, “This is different. That screwball Kilroy thought he was helping the war effort by slicing up ration-stamp hoarders. He only wore a uniform to get in the door.”

“I’d buy that this time around too. The Quartermaster Corps has got too much on its hands to keep track of what happens to its laundry.”

The lieutenant was restless. He’d tried sitting and straddling a number of vacant chairs like Goldilocks and wound up pacing the squad room chain-smoking Chesterfields. “We’re wasting time trying to talk ourselves out of thinking he’s a GI when we ought to be considering what if he is. Ox told us it’d been six weeks since the first two killings. Don’t that suggest something?”

“He’s on a cycle, like I said,” McReary reminded him. “We just got to—” He looked up, color flooding his face.

Zagreb nodded. “Basic training’s six weeks. Suppose he threw himself a little call-up party, or enlisted before the investigation turned on him. Now he’s out on leave.”

Canal, fogging the outside air with one of his nickel stogies, slid off the windowsill. Plaster fell from the ceiling when his clodhoppers hit the floor. “We need a date on that second killing, then call the War Department to see who signed up in any of the services during the next month.”

“Six weeks,” Zagreb said, “to be sure. You take it.”

“Give that to the kid, Zag. He’s good on the horn.”

“He’s better with girls his age. Mac, you’re going back to talk to the roommate, and if you come out without a line on just what uniform Bette’s last john had on, you got about as much chance of making sergeant as Sad Sack.”

“But she said she didn’t see anything.”

“That’s what she thinks. We need to narrow the suspects to one branch of the service. If this son of a bitch ships out before we ID him, he’ll be spilling civilian blood all over Europe and the Philippines.”

The roommate’s name was Jill Wheeler. Her landlady told McReary she was working, but that she usually returned home just after the five o’clock whistle.

Waiting for her at the bus stop on the corner, he caught himself humming “The Five O’Clock Whistle Never Blew.” He liked jive music okay, but the way the lyrics wormed their way into his brain shoved out everything important.

She alighted behind a stout woman in a babushka and woolen topcoat that made his own skin prickle in the heat, a dead duck swinging by its neck in one fist; Polish-populated Hamtramck was still the best place to procure quality poultry under rationing. By contrast, Jill Wheeler looked as fresh as Deanna Durbin. Her round face with its clear complexion, black hair cut in a bob, brimmed hat, summer dress, and chunky heels made a refreshing change from the world represented by her dead roommate.

She stopped before the man touching his hat, gripping her handbag tightly. “I know you.”

He introduced himself, steeling himself for the back-and-forth: “One or two more questions.”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Just for the record, miss.”

With that behind them, he escorted her back to her room. There, with the door left open to appease the landlady, she assured him repeatedly that she knew nothing about Bette Kowalski’s last rendezvous. (She actually used the word; he suspected she’d sat through Algiers at least twice.) At length he turned toward the door, putting on his hat. Taking it off in a young lady’s presence to expose his bare scalp had been a major contribution to the cause of justice. “If you remember anything else, please call me at headquarters. Daniel J. McReary, detective third grade.”

“I can’t think what that would be. All I know is she said she hoped she’d make some dogface wag its tail.”

He paused in the midst of smoothing the brim. “When’d she say that?”

“I don’t know; just before I left for my shift, I suppose. Yes, I was on my way out the door. Is it important?”

“Probably not. But thank you.” Lieutenant Zagreb had told him again and again never to let a witness know she’d put you on to something good. “Otherwise they’ll start making things up just to get you to pat ’em on the head.”

The fog didn’t roll, didn’t creep; the poets who wrote that had never visited London in the autumn. It spread like sludge from the harbor, yellow as piss and soggy as a snot rag, so thick round your ankles you swore you’d stepped into a bucket of dead squid. On the cobblestone streets, sound carried through it as across a lake; the poets were dead wrong about that as well, claiming it muffled noise when in fact Big Ben’s iron bell rang from a mile down the Thames fit to burst your eardrums.

Example: the squeak of a hinge, and a gush of tinny music, cut short abruptly by the clap of a door shutting against it, then the sole of a shoe scraping the pavement, sounding as close as if it were his own, but sharper; a narrow heel attached to a small foot, a fact confirmed by a puff of cheap scent. A woman, and one who doused herself, advertising her availability like a cat in heat. He felt the gorge of blood rising to his face; but he suppressed his rage, or more accurately channeled it toward the business at hand. He stepped from the doorway neighboring the public house, the fumes of ale and vomit and urine mingling with the fog as he passed the hellish place, fixing his gaze on snatches of tawdry satin and dyed feathers glimpsed between wisps of mist, but relying as fully on smell and sound; groping, as he closed the distance, for the handle of the knife on his belt...

McReary started awake. Having found Zagreb absent, he’d sat at the desk he’d commandeered for his studies to wait, and didn’t know he’d drifted off until the squad room door closed, shaking him out of his dream.

“You’re an angel when you sleep.” The lieutenant sat on a corner of the desk unoccupied by books and hung a cigarette on his lower lip. “You know, studying all night every night’s no good if you doze off during the test.”

“Sorry, L.T. I got something from the roommate.”

“Too soon. Probably just a bladder infection.”

“What? Oh.” He blushed. “Does the ribbing stop when I make sergeant?”

“Not unless we bring in a kid younger than you. What’d you get?”

“Just something that came out when I’d finished asking questions.” He told him what Jill Wheeler had said.

“Sure you heard her right?”

“Sure I’m sure. Think it’s anything?”

Canal came in just then and read their faces. “We take Berlin?”

“Close. The Kowalski dame as much as told her roommate her john was a dogface.”

“That’s army, ain’t it?”

“I think so. Don’t Burke have a brother or something in the army?”

“Brother-in-law,” said Burke, entering. “Dumb as a box of Lux. He’s a cinch to make general.”

“Ship out yet?”

“I wish. Dumb cluck’s still parking on my couch.”

“Ring him up.”

The detective snatched up a candlestick phone and dialed. “Me, Sadie. Roy in? Imagine that. Put him on. No, I’m not looking to bust his butt, just ask him a question. Well, sure I have. Didn’t I ask him just this morning when’s he going to start paying rent?” He pressed the mouthpiece to his chest. “I tell you, if I hadn’t knocked her up — Roy?” He leaned forward. “You ever hear anyone in basic call a guy with the navy or Marines a dogface?” He listened. “Okay.” He pegged the earpiece. “Sailors are gobs, Marines leathernecks or jarheads. Dogfaces are army buck privates. Always.”

“Gimme that phone.” Zagreb asked the long-distance operator for the War Department. While he was waiting, McReary said, “L.T., what’s it mean when a cop dreams he’s a perp?”

“It means he’s got the makings of a good detective.”

The news from Washington was disheartening at first. During the six weeks following the murder of Maria Zogu, the second victim, 166 men were recruited into the army from the Detroit area. Many phone calls later determined the following:

Thirty-four with the paratroopers had been shipped overseas directly after basic training, that service having suffered heavy casualties during the push toward Germany.

Twenty-three were discharged for unfitness or insubordination.

Sixteen of those were tracked down and their movements accounted for the night Bette Kowalski was murdered.

The remaining seven were interviewed and eliminated as likely suspects.

Three died during training, one from incaution during a drill involving live rounds, one from cerebral hemorrhage after a brawl in the PX, one from Spanish influenza.

Eighteen soldiers who’d been exposed to the stricken man were in quarantine at the time of the last murder.

The squad tabled six who supplied sound alibis for at least one of the first two killings.

Little by little, with help from Osprey’s Homicide detail, the uniform division, and reserves, most of the eighty-plus men left fell away, leaving just four: a handy number for the Four Horsemen to interview separately.

“What we got?” Zagreb asked when they reunited at 1300.

Canal passed an unlit cigar under his nose and made the same face the others usually made when he lit one. “My guy’s eighteen going on eleven. Tried every whistle stop between here and his hometown in Texas before he found a recruiting sergeant blind enough to accept the date of birth he gave. He’s a shrimp. Bette had muscles on her muscles from pounding the pavement and smacking around deadbeats. She’d’ve took him three falls out of three.”

Burke said, “Mine took a swing at me when I told him what I was looking into. I knocked him flat, frisked him and the dump he lives in. If he’s our guy, he sure cleans up after himself. He’s in holding downstairs.”

“We’ll take turns,” Zagreb said. “Mac?”

McReary got out his notebook. “Lives in Dearborn. With his mother, the landlord says. Both out; she cooks in the bomber plant in Willow Run, gets off at midnight. My guess is he’s sowing some oats before he ships out. The landlord wouldn’t let me check out the apartment. Should we get a warrant?”

“Not yet.” Zagreb looked at his watch. “Twenty to twelve. We’ll try schmoozing Mom when she comes home.”

“What about yours, Zag?” Canal asked.

“Halfway to Honolulu on a troop ship. If we turn anything up on a search warrant we can tip off the MPs, though I’d sure hate to dump it in somebody else’s lap.”

Burke grinned at McReary. “Slap on the Old Spice, Junior. If you can Romeo a jane like Bette’s roomie, the old lady on Dearborn’s a fish in a barrel.”

“Mrs. Corbett?” Zagreb took off his hat.

“Miss. I went back to my maiden name after my husband left me. For a tramp,” she added, pinching her nostrils.

The woman who’d opened the door had a slight middle-aged spread but was still attractive. A lock of strawberry-blond hair had strayed from the red bandanna she wore tied around her head. The lieutenant had to admit she resembled Rosie the Riveter, even if her skills with a stove surpassed those with a jackhammer. She smelled not unpleasantly of hot grease.

After the pleasantries, she let the squad into a tidy living room with a fake fireplace above which hung a period photograph in a matted frame of a man in his thirties who parted his hair in the middle and wore a trim mustache.

“My great-great-uncle Boston,” she said. “He’s the man who shot John Wilkes Booth.”

Zagreb nodded. “Good for him. Lincoln’s my favorite president.”

As the others took seats on slightly worn mohair cushions, their lieutenant went through all the motions, assuring their hostess that her son wasn’t in trouble, just that they wanted to speak with him in connection with an investigation.

“Leonard should be back any time,” she said. “He’s to report for duty at eight a.m. By this time next week he’ll be in England. I’m hoping he’ll find the time to visit family. His great-great-great-uncle was born there.” The cheerful glitter in her pale-brown eyes fell short of dissembling the concern behind them.

McReary noted it. “He’s your only child?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m sure he’ll be especially careful.”

“You’re very kind.”

Burke, not kind, asked if she knew where Leonard was on the night of the date Bette Kowalski was killed.

“Was it a weeknight?”

“Wednesday.” Zagreb cut his eyes Burke’s way, registering disapproval.

“I wouldn’t know, then. I’d have been at work. He may have stayed home, or he may have gone out for a beer with friends. That’s what he went out for tonight — he’s throwing himself a sort of going-away party.” Once again concern clouded the glitter in her eyes.

Canal fumbled at the pocket containing his cigars but refrained from taking one out. “Could we see his room?”

“Oh, I don’t know. He’s a very private person. He won’t even let me go in to clean.”

“We won’t disturb anything.” McReary looked sincere.

“I’m afraid he keeps it locked.”

“No problem, ma’am.” Canal took out a small leather case, displaying a collection of picks and skeleton keys.

The room was upstairs, with a yellow tin sign tacked to the door reading:

Mrs. Corbett’s smile was nervous. “Leonard’s little joke. He bought it in the army surplus store. He’s always bringing home odd bits.”

Five minutes, three keys, and two picks later, the sergeant got off his knees and twisted the knob. Artfully the four men arranged themselves between the woman and the door and drew their revolvers, shielding the maneuver from her line of sight with their bodies. They sprang in single file and spread out inside the room; holstered their weapons when it proved to be unoccupied.

“Holy—”

“Mackerel,” Zagreb interrupted Burke.

It was a small room with a single bed, a writing table, and a wooden chair. A Class-A army uniform in an open dry cleaner’s bag hung in a closet without a door. A metal bookrack beside the desk contained rows of worn books: The Lodger, The Curse of Mitre Square, several titled Jack the Ripper. A corkboard mounted above the table was plastered with black-and-white and sepia photographs, most of them clipped from newspapers and magazines, showing narrow cobblestone alleys, a stately building captioned NEW SCOTLAND YARD, and shots taken from dozens of angles of obviously dead women, some of them naked, exposing ghastly slashes imperfectly stitched.

Mrs. Corbett gasped in the hallway. Zagreb jerked his chin at Canal, standing nearest the door. He eased it shut and leaned his back against it.

“I’ve seen these,” McReary said. “There’s Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, Elizabeth Stride.” He indicated the grisliest image of all, a skilled artist’s sketch. “Mary Kelly, the Ripper’s last known victim. Ring a bell?”

“He cut up Bette Kowalski the same way,” Canal said.

A black satchel, like the kind doctors carried, stood open on the table. It was old and cracked. Zagreb reached inside and began taking out the contents: stethoscope, glass medicine bottles, scalpels, a gadget resembling a brace and bit — what some people called a hand drill. He held up the last item. “You’re the big reader, Mac. This looks like it belongs in a carpenter’s toolbox.”

“Trepan.” McReary paled. “They don’t make ’em anymore. Forensic surgeons used it to bore holes in skulls, looking for bullets and such. It’s an autopsy kit, L.T.”

“None of these scalpels looks big enough for the murder weapon.”

“There should be a postmortem knife in the bag.” The detective third grade spread his hands a foot apart. “About yay long. The experts figured that’s what the Ripper used.”

Zagreb rummaged further, then picked up the bag and dumped it upside down onto the table. No such instrument made its appearance.

Mrs. Corbett had no idea where her son had gone to celebrate his last night as a civilian. Zagreb borrowed her phone and described Leonard Corbett from a recent photo supplied by his agitated mother, showing a bland-faced young man in his uniform. Minutes later they were driving with the two-way radio turned up full blast.

“Any cars in the vicinity of Woodward and Parsons,” crackled the dispatcher’s voice. “Suspect seen near the Paradise Theatre. Consider him armed and extremely dangerous.”

“That place draws almost as many hookers as jazz buffs,” Zagreb said.

Burke flipped on the siren and hit the gas.

The street in front of the popular swing club was a sea of department vehicles, marked and unmarked. Spotting a uniformed officer on the sidewalk holding his sidearm, Zagreb rolled down the window and flashed his shield.

The patrolman skipped the preliminaries. “Someone just ducked down that alley.” He pointed with his weapon.

They left the Chrysler at the curb. At the lieutenant’s instructions, McReary and Canal circled the building on the corner to come in from the other end. Zagreb and Burke gave them two minutes, then entered from the Woodward Avenue side. All four had their weapons out.

Crossing a dark doorway, McReary glimpsed a movement in the shadows. He touched Burke’s arm. Burke nodded and leveled his revolver on the doorway as his partner entered. The deep passage was black as a shroud. He felt for the door. A hinge squeaked and it swung open at his touch.

A long hallway with a checkerboard floor showed barely in the dim light of a wall sconce. The far end was in deep shadow. He crept forward.

The man at the far end of the hall came to a locked door. He turned and pressed his back to it, holding his breath. Three yards away, visible in the lighted section, a man with a gun was approaching, wearing a dark suit and a light-colored hat. He himself was secure in the blackness, as if he were enveloped in thick fog. The man creeping his way wore shoes appropriate to someone who habitually carried a gun, but he could hear the slight squish of the rubber soles as he advanced, smell the crisp odor of spice-based aftershave. That was another advantage, his heightened senses. But he would have to move fast and strike surely; this was no tart, her brains dulled by liquor and the plague her kind had brought upon itself.

Closer now. He could almost reach out and touch the man. He drew the knife from his belt and sprang...

Suddenly the shadow at the end of the hall coagulated into something blacker, a distinct shape dressed all in dark clothing. Fabric rustled; the light behind McReary drew a bright line down a length of steel. He raised his piece and fired. Something stung his wrist, something hot splashed onto his hand. An evil stench of singed cloth filled his nostrils; the muzzle flare had set the man’s coat on fire.

He kept jerking the trigger, emptying the chamber. Something heavy piled into him. Automatically he threw his arms around it, supporting the dead man entirely.

It was only after he let go and the man slid into a heap at his feet that he realized his wrist was bleeding.

Daniel J. McReary entered the squad room. From habit he reached for his sidearm, intending to lay it on the desk still stacked with books, then remembered. Pending the results of the routine shooting investigation, he’d been relieved of his weapon and assigned to desk duty.

He brightened when Lieutenant Zagreb came in. Flicking the hand belonging to the bandaged wrist at the book on top of the stack, he said, “I’ve been reading.”

“What else is new?”

“It’s about the Lincoln assassination. I got interested after Mrs. Corbett told us she was related to the man who killed John Wilkes Booth. This Boston Corbett was a piece of work: born in England under Queen Victoria, with all that entails. He was so mortified after going to bed with a prostitute he castrated himself.”

Burke, cleaning his revolver at a nearby desk, dropped it on the blotter. “Holy—”

“Shit,” Canal finished. “A thing like that can make a man surly.”

“Do tell.” McReary opened the book to the page he’d marked. “Says here twenty years after he shot Booth they stuck him in a loony bin for pulling a gun in the Kansas House of Representatives, but he escaped in 1888 and was never heard from since. That’s the year the Ripper killings took place. What are the odds Corbett went back home and...?”

“You think Leonard knew about that?” Burke picked up his revolver and blew through the barrel.

“You should write a book,” Zagreb said.

“Not me. I’m through with ’em.” He slammed the volume shut and tossed it aside.

The lieutenant lifted his eyebrows. “You failed the sergeant’s exam?”

“I fell asleep.”