AFTER LEAVING ROMA’S, MAX Zagreb said good night to the others and went back to his office at 1300 Beaubien. There was no one waiting for him in the two-room apartment on Michigan Avenue, and he didn’t feel like going back and listening to dance music from the Oriole Ballroom. He sublet the apartment from a marine whose last address was in Sydney, Australia, depositing his rent the first of every month in an escrow account at the National Bank of Detroit. On the same day he made his monthly mortgage payment to Detroit Manufacturers Bank to maintain the two-story house he’d moved out of on Rivard last December. His wife’s complaint, he remembered as he shuffled through the photographs of the slashed and bloated corpse that had surfaced in Flatrock Monday, was that he never discussed his work.
The office had even less of the personal touch than the apartment, but at least it was supposed to be that way. His Academy class picture, just another stamped-out face in an oval among three rows of them, hung crooked between a war map and a bulletin board shingled three-deep with FBI wanted circulars, most of them featuring espionage suspects. A Stroh’s beer case stuffed with files stood atop a scratched green file cabinet—overflow from the drawers—and a black Royal typewriter with a wide document carriage occupied a metal stand next to his yellow oak desk, a scrapyard of arrest forms, stacks of copies of the News, Times, and Free Press turning orange, and unwashed coffee mugs serving double duty as paperweights. There was a coffin-shaped Airline radio with a police scanner and a steel wastebasket bearing a label reading WARNING—VOLATILE MATERIAL that he had inherited from the room’s former occupant, who had appropriated it from the Chrysler tank plant before shipping out to England. Someone had pasted a cutout of Betty Boop to the inside of the frosted-glass door, then tried to remove it with a scrub brush, leaving only the huge eyes and chronic pout. Something about it reminded him of the KILROY WAS HERE cartoon on the sidewalk in front of the house where Anna Levinski was killed. He’d thought about finding a brush and finishing the job, but had decided against it. A little reminder couldn’t hurt.
Aside from convincing him that the Levinski woman had been Kilroy’s second victim, the details of the Flatrock case were no help. The victim, Ernest Sullivan, was a retired Cork-town bartender, reported missing three days before by his daughter, who after the body was discovered insisted she knew nothing about unredeemed ration stamps. Neighbors and merchants in stores where he shopped reported seeing fistfuls of stamps bound with rubber bands whenever he took out his wallet, but added that he seldom used them, paying for non-ration items with cash. No wallet was found on the body, and the local police assumed the motive was robbery. Details of the autopsy were a close match with Dr. Edouard’s in the Yegerov killing and Zagreb’s own observation of the corpse in the Levinski case. All three victims had been sliced open lengthwise like watermelons.
Zagreb laid the file atop the debris on the desk, thumbed down to the folder marked LEVINSKI, and looked through the contents, setting aside the crime-scene and autopsy photos, which were useless to anyone but a student of geriatric anatomy. Again he fingered the scrap of newsprint he had used to make an impression of the pen scratches on the varnished top of Anna Levinski’s lamp table. The photographer, who had done his best, had succeeded only in confirming what they’d already guessed, despite the many angles he had used in shooting the table and the chemicals he had used to treat the negatives. The script matched samples from grocery lists Mrs. Levinski had written, and the rest of “Hamtramck” and part of the house number proved she had recorded her address on something—shortly before she died, if the fresh ink stains on her hands were any indication. No pen had been found containing ink to match, and no recent documents on which she had written her address. He couldn’t help thinking that the reason she had been writing, and the fact that the killer appeared to have taken the pen and document with him when he left, were central to the solution. He wondered if she was ordering something. Posing as a salesman was one way to get inside a strange door.
OST
He said it aloud: “Oh ess tee.”
The photographer had been unable to coax any more letters out of the other part of what she had written; the pictures had nothing to add to that part of the paper in Zagreb’s hand. He produced another fold of newsprint from his inside breast pocket, his makeshift notebook, spread it out on the corner of the desk, and made a list:
MOST
HOST
GHOST
POST
POSTER
ROSTER
NOSTRIL
After that he went blank. None of the words helped. He refolded the sheet and returned it to his pocket. Maybe something better would occur to him when his brain was fresh. He wondered if Walters, the Hamtramck detective who had presided over the initial investigation, had had any luck canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses. He called the Hamtramck PD, but got only a desk sergeant who told him Walters wouldn’t be in until 8:00 A.M. tomorrow. Zagreb’s Wittnauer said it was ten past one. He rang off without saying good-bye.
He walked back to his apartment. He’d let the others have the car and his own vehicle, a 1939 Plymouth coupe, was in storage. The garage fees were less than he would have spent on gasoline and oil and tires even if he had the ration tickets, and between his rent and the mortgage payments on a house he was no longer living in he had barely enough left to buy cigarettes and groceries. Anyway, he did some of his best thinking when he was walking. Just now he was thinking that for all the good his thinking was doing the City of Detroit he might as well enlist in the navy. No one expected you to use your brain when you were swabbing a deck.
At Fort he stopped and waited for the light to change, he didn’t know why. There were no cars in sight, not another person on the street. If it weren’t for the lights he saw in several of the buildings, he might have thought a blackout was in effect. He wondered if the end of the war, if it ever ended, would bring back the city’s nightlife, or if people would grow accustomed to early evenings, cheap novels printed on coarse paper, and necessities doled out by a stern bureaucracy. Already the days of neon lights in Cadillac Square and weekend jaunts to Windsor seemed part of a past so remote it might have been something described to him by his grandfather.
While he was waiting he shook a Chesterfield out of the pack and rattled the remaining contents. Only two more. He couldn’t remember if there had been another unopened pack in the carton that morning or if this were the last. He glanced at the Cunningham’s on the opposite corner, willing it to be open. The CLOSED sign was in the door. There was a light in the display window to discourage burglars, beyond which he could see part of the magazine rack and, tantalizingly, rows of crisp cigarette cartons in front of the pharmacy counter. He sighed and returned the unlit cigarette to the pack. He needed one to put himself to bed, another to wake himself up in the morning, and a third with his coffee.
He looked again at the drugstore window. The light had changed, but he’d lost interest in it. One of the glossy magazine covers in the rack was partially obscured behind a Revlon lipstick display on an easel in the window. All he could read were the last three letters of the magazine’s name: OST.
He recognized the typeface and the distinctive style of the cover illustration. There was no need for a closer look, but he crossed the street and stood in front of the window, leaning close and cupping his hands around his eyes to block the glare from the corner streetlight. From that angle he could see the entire cover. It featured a Norman Rockwell painting of a gang of half-dressed boys running away from a pond with a NO SWIMMING sign prominently displayed. It was the July issue of the Saturday Evening Post.