Free Jitterbug by Loren D. Estleman

“That makes two of us.”

chapter nine
    A FTER LEAVING R OMA’S, M AX 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