FOR A TIME AFTER Dwight Littlejohn left his office, Max Zagreb sat doing nothing. His hands took out his cigarette pack, but he looked at the heap of coffee-stained butts in the bronze ashtray and his stomach did a slow-turn. He returned the pack to his shirt pocket, turned up the volume on the police-band, then after a minute or so realized he wasn’t taking in a word of what he was hearing, and turned it off.
He felt exhausted and vaguely ashamed of himself. He looked at the smooth, characterless face of Police Cadet Zagreb in the group photograph hanging crooked on the wall and couldn’t think of a way to explain to him that serving the citizens of Detroit meant bullying the Dwight Littlejohns who came to it. The Earl Littlejohns were halfway to hell already. But he wasn’t bothered so much by his parting words to Dwight as he was by the fact that he wasn’t bothered more. That was how Inspector Brandons happened.
“McReary!”
The typewriter stopped chartering. The door opened and the bald officer leaned in.
“Hear anything yet from that Lieutenant Walters in Hamtramck?”
“Not a thing. Want me to call him?”
“I’ll do it.” Zagreb lifted the receiver, found the number on the mustard-stained list he kept next to the telephone, and dialed. McReary was still standing in the doorway. “What.”
“You really kicking Littlejohn?”
“Small fish. Bait.”
“What’ll you tell those newspaper assholes when they ask if we’ve made any arrests?”
“Why don’t you let me worry about that?”
McReary shook his head. “I’ll never be a lieutenant. How do you know when you’re making a mistake?”
“Make plenty.”
The officer left. When Walters finally came on the line, Zagreb heard syrupy music in the background. It was too early for One Man’s Family. Maybe the scrawny albino had a weakness for Fred Waring.
“I never heard whether your boys turned anything on that house-to-house,” Zagreb said.
Violins simpered through a perplexed pause on the other end.
Jesus Christ. “Anna Levinski,” he prompted. “Someone cut her open in your jurisdiction?”
“Oh, right. I thought you’d have that tied up by now.” Paper crackled. “Levinski, Levinski. Okay.” A chair squeaked. “This ain’t as simple as it would’ve been a couple of years ago. Back then everyone was driving like a bat out of hell, foot traffic stood out. It’s a busy neighborhood, shortcut to just about everywhere, and everybody’s shank’s mare now. Also all the housewives are working in the plants.”
“You said that before.” He suspected Walters was bored and wanted someone to talk to.
“Talked to a Henrietta Wolocek.” Walters spelled it. “She’s at three-oh-one-two Dequindre, next block. Widow, sixty-two. Neighborhood snoop, spends more time in her front window than the silver star she got when her boy went down on the Arizona. Saw a bunch of people she didn’t know on the street the morning of the murder. We checked out the meter reader, he was a substitute, regular guy called in sick. Guy in a blue pinstriped suit knocked on the door of the house across the street and was let in. Talked to the homeowner there, want his name?”
“Later.”
“Pinstripes an adjuster with NBD, came there to inspect the property. Owner wants to refinance his mortgage. It checked out at the bank.”
“What else?”
“Nothing. The usual mix of strangers in a hurry, suits and coveralls and military uniforms. Needle in a haystack. Maybe you got the personnel to run them all down. I sure don’t. Send the report over?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Walters. Good work.”
“Always ready to help. Especially when it’s the Four—”
Zagreb hung up.
“McReary!”
McReary leaned in.
“Where’s the Yegerov file?”
The bald officer stared at the pile on Zagreb’s desk. “I think you’ve got it, Zag.”
“Shit.”
He spent the next, quarter hour looking for it. As long as he was at it he did a general housecleaning, glancing at and tossing obsolete memos into the wastebasket, finding room for the files he didn’t need immediately in the cabinet and the beer case on top of it, and shoveling the rest into the catchall drawer at the bottom of the desk. When he had a relatively clean work surface he spread open the file on the murdered dry cleaner. Except for the autopsy report, which matched those of Anna Levinski and Ernest Sullivan as to cause of death, there was nothing in the Yegerov case to link it to the others. He was not a hoarder, had a record of using the scanty number of stamps issued an aging widower with no dependents regularly. Few friends, none close, no known enemies.
Zagreb would have kicked the case back to Brandon except for the fact that if he laid any of the postmortem shots on top of any of those in the other two files and held them up to the light, all three ghastly incisions lined up. He was no great hand at homicide, but had sat in on enough investigations to recognize a brushstroke when he saw one.
He came to a photostat of the ledger page into which Yegerov recorded his business activities on the day he was killed. The old man had used Yiddish as a kind of shorthand, but Zagreb hadn’t lied to Dwight Littlejohn when he said he’d grown up in a mixed neighborhood; his smattering of Balkan tongues, Gaelic, street-nigger, and kike served him more often than any classical student’s knowledge of Greek and Latin. The cleaner had taken in several dresses, three suits, one blue and two brown, and a wedding gown. In a separate column he had recorded amounts paid for the items that had been reclaimed. The lieutenant turned from the photostat to the inventory of items found in the shop by police officers after his body was discovered. No wedding gown, but the gown had been brought in first thing that morning, cleaned, pressed, accepted, and paid for the same day. The dresses and one of the brown suits were still in inventory. The blue had needed pressing only and had been reclaimed and the transaction noted. Zagreb looked for the other brown suit in Yegerov’s ledger and found it, identified as “Anz, brn, ink,” with something illegible scribbled between the last two words. He slid his finger over to the transaction column. There was no entry.
Could be nothing. The cleaner was getting on, he had put in a long day, and when the garment was reclaimed he might have forgotten to record the event. But it was the only lapse on the sheet. A brown suit had been dropped off to have an ink stain or stains removed and the suit was not in the shop.
He was puzzled also by the nonsensical scribble following “Anz, brn.” Anzug meant suit of clothes. The thing after “brn”—brown—didn’t even look like letters. It might have been a doodle, except the neat characters and figures in the columns didn’t suggest a doodling kind of personality.
“McReary!”
This time Canal opened the door. “He’s taking a shit. Want me to tell him to wipe up and get moving?”
“I need his eyes.”
“I got eyes enough for us both.”
“I mean a younger set. Well, take a look at this.”
The big sergeant had to swivel his shoulders to get through the door. He picked up the sheet and held it close to his face.
“If you can make it out, I can translate,” Zagreb said. “If it doesn’t make sense it’s Yiddish.”
“These are Cyrillic letters.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means it ain’t Yiddish. It’s Russian.”
“Yegerov was a Russian Jew. You read Russian?”
“My grandfather was a Cossack in the Imperial Guard. I got cop in my blood.” He looked at it again, then put it back down in front of Zagreb. “It says ‘uniform.’”