Jitterbug by Loren D. Estleman

his brain. The carbolic smell that dominated the autopsy rooms had penetrated to every room of the building, and Burke, who had shot and killed two men when he was with the uniform division and been suspended for strangling a third nearly to death in interrogation, hated corpses to the point of phobia. Recently he had refused to serve as pallbearer for the aunt who had raised him.
    A portable radio encased in tough fabric with a Bakelite grille was going on about Pantelleria, but nobody appeared to be listening. No one in the room had ever heard of the island before the marines hit it. The announcer sounded as excited as if they’d taken Rome.
    “Ladies, I guess I’m the stiff-watcher for this outfit,” said Zagreb, being sure to make the comment general. Burke was inclined to sulk.
    “One gob of guts looks pretty much like all the rest.” McReary blew a kiss to the anatomy chart and turned away. “Is it our boy?”
    “Brandon thinks it is.”
    Canal clunked down his empty bottle and belched dramatically. “That means he don’t think he can tie it up. They ought to issue us brooms. All we do is sweep up everybody else’s crap.”
    “We’d better get to sweeping quick. Three’s the limit before the papers catch wind.” The lieutenant gave them the details on Simeon Yegerov.
    “It don’t figure,” Canal said. “Boys like Kilroy don’t light out till they get what they’re after. He’d frisk the stiff in the middle of the Hudson’s parade.”
    Zagreb said, “We’ll park that for now. Twice he’s taken ration stamps. A lot of ration stamps. Either he likes big breakfasts and ball-busting auto trips or he’s laying them off somewhere. And there’s only one place to sell them in this town.”
    Burke came out of his trance. “The Conductor.”
    “Frankie Fucking Orr.” Canal tasted it, liking it more with each syllable.
    McReary touched the tender spot on the side of his neck, as if it alone had prevented him from coming up with the answer first.
    Zagreb’s Wittnauer had stopped. He shook it, wound the stem. The sweep hand started moving. His Timex self-winder had given up the ghost just before Dunkirk. All the other self-winders had gone to war and he hadn’t gotten into the habit of winding regularly. “What time is it?”
    McReary checked the Curvex strapped to the underside of his wrist. “A little after eleven. Roma’s stopped serving an hour ago.”
    “Roma’s stops serving when Frankie goes home,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve been turning over Kilroy’s dry turds long enough. Let’s just this once get out in front of the cocksucker.”

chapter seven
    “T HAT WAS THE BEST movie,” the girl said.
    “It was great. I like Robert Taylor.”
    He thought it was” the finest movie ever made. He’d been eager to see Bataan ever since it went into production. He had read about it in Parade, seen a picture of Taylor, in combat fatigues and smoking a cigarette, going over the script with the director, and had been checking off the days on the calendar before the release date as conscientiously as he kept track of allied engagements with flag pins on the war map in his living room. The final shot of Taylor, the last American on the island, chopping away with a water-cooled machine gun at swarms of victorious Japs like a twentieth-century General Custer, thrilled him, filling him with nationalistic pride and validating his conviction that the U.S. could never be beaten, even if it lost every battle but the last. He knew he would go back to see it again and again.
    He had met the girl in the course of his employment as a messenger. It was the third job he’d had that year. Jobs held no value, they were all around, provided the person who applied knew that he would have to move on as soon as the man he was replacing came back from the service. He never waited for that to happen. When he became bored enough he quit.
    Her name was Erma, with an E. She had been standing behind the cosmetics