Read Online Jitterbug by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online

before going home to empty apartments and sullen families.
    “The burners should still be hot.” Carlo snapped his fingers. A waiter in a knee-length apron separated himself from a group surreptitiously checking wristwatches and came their way.
    “Frankie in?” Zagreb asked.
    The maître d’ uncorked his lidless stare. “Signor Oro is dining in his private room. I’ll ask if he’s receiving visitors.”
    “Make sure he says yes.”
    Seated in a corner booth under a framed print of The Last Supper, the four detectives glanced at their red leather menus and folded them at the same instant, like a precision drill. “Veal parmigiana?” asked the lieutenant.
    Canal said, “Double order for me. Two jugs of Dago Red.”
    “One jug. We’re working.” Zagreb handed the menus to the waiter.
    “I’ll just have the chowder,” said Burke. “My gut’s on end again.”
    McReary said, “In that case I’ll have your veal, too. Getting the shit stomped out of me in a bar always brings out my appetite.”
    Canal wiped each of his protruding eyes with a corner of his napkin. The condition was the result of an overactive thyroid and they tended to water at the end of the shift. “You’re just compensating for missing out on that leggy barmaid at the Ladybug.”
    “‘Compensating’?” Burke was still a little pale from the morgue.
    “His wife bought him a subscription to Reader’s Digest. ” Zagreb peeled off his hat and smoothed his hair back from his bulbous forehead.
    “Hey, I’d rather whack off to her than that picture of Betty Grable you got in your wallet,” McReary told Canal.
    “It’s Alice Faye.”
    The waiter left, and returned with a basket of bread and a pitcher of ice water. While he was pouring, a young couple came in the front door. The young man spoke briefly to Carlo, who shook his head. After some fumbling the young man produced a pair of crumpled bills. They vanished, and Carlo snapped his fingers. The girl was pretty, not much more. Her date was good-looking and knew it. He reminded Zagreb of a hundred good-looking young men he had seen hawking Pfeiffer and Luckies on billboards. The lieutenant wondered why he wasn’t in uniform. A waiter led the couple to a table behind a post and Zagreb forgot all about them.
    “Signor Oro will see you now.”
    Zagreb looked up from his bread slowly; an act of will in a situation that would have made most men jump. He hadn’t seen Carlo approaching, had not noticed that he had ever left the reservation stand to consult Frankie Orr. Life was mystifying. Burke and Canal and McReary clattered through it like junkwagons, making noise and drawing attention, and they became plainclothes detectives. Carlo the swarthy Sardinian could make himself invisible in a roomful of redheaded Irishmen, and he became a headwaiter.
    “Tell him I’ll be there when I finish my meal.”
    “He’s going home soon.”
    “It’s a free country. If he doesn’t mind us dragging his guinea ass out of bed and down to the basement at Thirteen Hundred.”
    Carlo’s unblinking stare was his only response. Then he was gone.
    Canal grinned. “Just for a second there you sounded like Father Coughlin.”
    “I got a thing against making appointments with cheap crooks.”
    “So how long you going to let him boil?”
    Zagreb smeared butter on his hunk of bread. “Just till I finish this.”
    “Miss the uniform, I guess.”
    McReary dunked his own bread in his glass of water. “Zag knows he’s safe. There ain’t enough dicks to go around till they hang Hitler.”
    Burke said, “Going back to uniform don’t scare me. I don’t want Carlo spitting in my chowder.”
    When the lieutenant ate the last of his bread, the others pushed back their chairs. “Just Canal,” he said. “I don’t want to give the little greaseball a coronary.”
    “He’d have to have a heart to begin with,” Burke said. But he reached for his bread.
    The room, normally reserved for large parties,