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

contained Frankie Orr, seated in the middle of the long, empty table, and Tino, his bodyguard and sometime driver, pretending to be a piece of furniture in a corner. A tattered green, red, and white flag from some forgotten Italian campaign decorated a mahogany-paneled wall lined with portraits in frames of olive-skinned men in stiff collars with oiled hair and studs in their ties. Tino, a product of a Sicilian coastal village where sailors had docked for six hundred years, was fair-haired and blue-eyed, with roses in his cheeks and a beautiful mouth, curved like a violin. He had a twenty-inch neck and the muscles of his jaws stuck out on either side like barbells. Zagreb knew he carried an army .45 automatic in an underarm holster and that he used it to snuff out candles at outdoor wedding receptions on Belle Isle. His permit to carry a concealed weapon was signed by Governor Kelly; one of several services requested by his employer in return for helping to end a milk drivers’ strike in Port Huron. Two arrests, petty theft and assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder, no convictions. Zagreb liked Tino. He had bought his widowed father a house in Sterling Heights and had been among the first to present himself for recruitment at the Light Guard Armory after Pearl Harbor—catching hell from Frankie, who had pulled a senator out of bed to see that the paperwork was torn up. The bodyguard wore an American flag pin in his lapel and bought war bonds every payday.
    Francis Xavier Oro, a Brooklyn tough imported by the late Sal Borneo to save Oro from street retribution following his acquittal on a charge of garroting a man to death aboard the New York elevated railway—hence the sobriquet the Conductor—had put on weight since Prohibition, but retained the slick good looks of a movie gangster. Streaks of silver highlighted the glossy black waves of his hair, and his teeth—straightened, bleached, and bonded—shone blue-white against his sunlamp tan when he chose to smile, which he seldom did when the police were present. His brows were plucked, his face close-shaven by a barber, and the nails on the fingers he was wiping with a moist warm towel provided by the waiter were pared and buffed, although never polished. The fit alone of his dark suit bespoke its two-hundred-dollar price tag, and a conservative striped necktie lay quietly against his white shirt. He had abandoned flash after the lesson of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, who had gone to prison more for the showiness of their lifestyle than the charges the government had trumped up against them. Rumor had it Frankie had been more than peripherally involved in the killing of radio commentator Jerry Buckley in 1931. Uncorroborated testimony by one witness before a grand jury had accused him of slashing the throat of a disloyal employee in a downtown restaurant the same year.
    Orr put down the towel, picked up a knife, and pried open a mussel on a plate mounded high with them. A boneyard of empty shells lay on a platter at his elbow. “Max Zagreb,” he said without looking up. “What the hell kind of a name’s that?”
    “Yugoslavian. What kind of name’s Orr?”
    “Oro. If I wanted to go by what the newspapers call me I’d of put it on my citizenship papers.”
    “The State Department wants to yank your citizenship, I heard.”
    “The State Department’s got its hands full rounding up Japs to send to Manzanar.”
    “They’ll run out of Japs.” Zagreb put his hands in his pockets. “I hear Mussolini hangs mafiosos six at a time. Right on the dock when they’re deported from America.”
    “Mussolini’s got his hands full, too. You a citizen, Lieutenant?”
    “I was born here.”
    “I would of been if I’d had a say. It’s a great country. You know I came here with forty-eight dollars in my pocket? Now I own two hotels and I’m negotiating for a quarter interest in the Hazel Park track. The streets really are paved with gold.”
    Canal