by D. M. Pulley
“Who? The scary headhunter? Nah. Probably it was a wop hit. What’s it matter?”
“You see his face?” Another splash.
“Course I saw it.” The other man laughed. “He gave me the money, didn’t he?”
“What’d he look like?”
“I don’t know. He sort of had a funny look about ’im. He said, ‘Bless you, son,’ when I took the sacks from ’im. ‘Bless you.’ How you like that?” This revelation was followed by another splash.
Ethel clamped her mouth shut with her hand.
“How’d he know we wouldn’t just go to the cops? There’s that reward for anyone that finds the killer.”
“The cops would sooner hang the two of us as give us a listen. He said, ‘If I were you, I’d throw these into the river and disappear, but the choice is yours.’ You wanna go roll the dice with the cops? You wanna explain how we came to have a bunch of burlap sacks of chopped meat? You think they wouldn’t hang us for the whole lot?”
“Nope. Just askin’.”
“Well quit runnin’ your yap and help me.” There was one last splash.
“He threw a little somethin’ extra in. When was the last time you had some honest-to-God whiskey?” There was a prolonged silence. “Ah. That’s the stuff. Here.”
“That the good shit from over the lake?” the other voice asked. “Whooeee! That’s the juice, boy.”
“Shut your trap. You wanna fight off the bums? C’mon . . .”
Their voices drifted back up the hill.
Ethel bolted up and stared into the dark after them, debating whether to follow the two drunks and demand to know who had given them those sacks. She had no doubt what sort of meat they were holding. The screams she’d heard through the floor drain rang through her head. But she locked them away.
It wouldn’t do any good to find the bastards, she decided, picking her way toward the water. They’d be blind drunk in no time and liable to slit her throat or worse. The hobo jungles were full of vagabonds like them, willing to do anything for a bottle of decent whiskey, let alone twenty dollars. None of them were ever sober enough to remember much of anything. A killer could give them whatever he pleased.
The riverbank sat silent. The black water slipped past the shore, carrying its secrets along with the filth of the world. There was no sign of the burlap sacks anywhere.
The sun finally rose above the factory smokestacks. Back in Papa’s shanty, the embers of the fire were slowly dying. Ethel pulled the twine belt from the snoring drunk’s pants and secured her stolen bedsheet into a makeshift dress. Papa snorted and rolled over.
She found her way up the hill toward the spot she’d last heard the voices of the two men. Behind her, the river ran the sludge and sewage out into Lake Erie, indifferent as the sky over her head.
Working her way up to the street, she saw a pair of depressions in the tall grass. She made her way over to them to find two men lying facedown a few feet apart. It wasn’t that odd of a sight. Nearly all the inhabitants of the shantytown were sleeping it off at that hour. She approached the men slowly, not wanting to rouse them, but as she stepped closer, a queer feeling twisted her gut. They weren’t lying right. She stopped at the misaligned feet of the closest one and knelt down. The air reeked of urine and feces. A brown bottle locked in the other man’s hand had spilled out onto the ground. The feeling that something was wrong tightened its springs until she realized what it was.
They weren’t breathing.
Frost covered their backs and the scraggly hairs on their heads. She lurched up and scanned the surrounding hillside. It was empty. She surveyed the ground for the weapon that had done them both in, but there was nothing. No blood. She circled the bodies until one of their faces appeared through the long grass. His blue eyes bulged out at the road. His mouth hung open over a pool of drying vomit. She glanced again at the bottle still lodged in the other one’s hand, and it wasn’t hard to guess what had happened. From the tattered clothing and unshaved faces of the men, she could see what the police would see. A couple of bums had drunk themselves into a stupor and frozen to death. It happened every day in the jungles. No one would know that a killer had given them the bottle. No one but her.
Ethel stood there and debated what to do about it. It was bad luck to be found with a dead body. At best, she could count on being taken into police custody for at least a week. At worst, they’d send her back to the workhouse. She gazed down at their bloated faces and couldn’t muster a single emotion but disgust. This is the price of doing a killer’s dirty work, she thought to herself. She eyed the pockets of the two dead men, thinking of that twenty dollars, wondering what price she’d pay one day.
She worried over the two dead bodies the whole way to the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. It sat a mile to the north along the twisting river. She climbed up the ridge to West 3rd Street and headed toward it, weighing her options. The detective that ruined her life had instructed her to call if she had any information about the murders. But what information did she really have? She hadn’t seen the killer. She’d only heard screams, which could be attributed to anything. Johnnie was just a deranged child living underground. The girl might’ve been lying or distorting what she’d seen and heard, and odds were good Ethel would never find her again. She didn’t even know what Johnnie looked like.
Her makeshift dress dragged on the ground as she walked. The burlap rags on her feet were black with dirt. She smelled of hobo and had a criminal record for solicitation and manslaughter. No one would listen to the likes of her. She’d been raped and beaten more times than she cared to remember and had never filed a single police report in her life. What good would it do?
The photographs the detective had shoved under her chin flashed in front of her. A nameless, dismembered girl lying in pieces on the slab. Eddie’s tattooed boy. Then Flo Polillo’s hacked-up arms and legs. You could be next.
“Jesus, I need a drink,” she muttered to herself. The taverns wouldn’t open until eleven.
Over her shoulder, the Harmony Mission sat five blocks away. Brother Wenger would have discovered her escape by now, she figured. He’d be wondering how she had managed it. Maybe he’d decide God had set her free or that the devil had swallowed her whole, but she doubted it. He would eventually come looking for her. Maybe he’d bring her a nice bottle of whiskey to keep her quiet too.
The Lorain-Carnegie Bridge rose high above the river, high enough to kill a person if they ever decided to jump. It flew over the industrial wastelands and shantytowns below, connecting downtown Cleveland to Ohio City, separating the city above from the city below. At the base of the bridge, under the abutments, she found him.
“What in the world is a beautiful thing like you doing in a place like this, sweetheart?” he asked in a lilting drawl to match the long dress he was wearing. He was perched on top of the enormous abutment, high-heeled feet dangling over the gravel pits. “Come to see my view?”
“Hi,” Ethel breathed, winded from climbing up the steep hill to his little home. She stood up on the concrete platform under the enormous steel girders of the bridge and gazed out over half of Cleveland. The frost had already melted as the temperature climbed mercifully above freezing. “It’s impressive.”
“Isn’t it?” He looked up at her expectantly. He was an enormous man with dark Mediterranean skin and even darker eyes. It was a wonder he’d found a dress to fit him.
“Yeah, but I came here to see you, honey. A friend of mine said you might have some clothes.”
“Oh, really?” He crossed his legs coyly and eyed her bedsheet dress. “Who’s your friend?”
Ethel forced a wry grin. “Papa? You know him?”
The man twittered. “I’ve known a lot of Papas.”
She didn’t doubt it. Up under the bridge bearings between the steel trusses, over fifty women’s shoes were set in a line. She could only guess how he’d collected them. “Well, do you think we could make some sort of trade?”
“It don’t l
ook like you have much to bargain with, sugar. And hate to tell you, but you’re not my type.” He flashed her the gold tooth set in the corner of his grin. “You got any money?”
“Will this do?” she asked and pulled out the twenty dollars she’d taken from the dead man’s pocket.
The man’s eyes grew wide. They were almost pretty the way he’d lined them with coal, but the shadow of a beard ruined the effect. “That’ll do nicely. What can I help you with?”
“Dress, coat, shoes, makeup, and a hairbrush.”
“Done, darling.”
“And I’ll need ten back.”
His smile twitched at the corners.
Ethel shrugged. “A girl’s gotta eat.”
“Ain’t that the truth, honey.” The man pursed his lips and calculated the numbers in his head. “Five back, and I’ll give you your pick of the litter. I’ll even throw in a pair of leather gloves.”
“Eight.”
“Seven.”
“Fine.” Ethel held out her hand and they shook on it. His hand was the size of a dinner plate—a fact that he tried to hide with gaudy bracelets.
“So.” He looked over her shoulder as she perused his three trunks of ladies’ undergarments and frocks. “What brings you up here, sugar?”
“Let’s just say I made the wrong friends.” Ethel picked out a new slip and a dress and began trying on shoes.
“Haven’t we all?”
“What’s your name?”
“People call me Rickey, like the drink.” He didn’t bother asking Ethel hers.
“Say, Rickey.” She turned to him. “You like to sit up here and watch the city, right?”
“Oh, I do.”
“Have you seen anything strange lately?” She scanned the banks leading down to the river, wondering where they’d found Rose. “Anything you wouldn’t want to tell the police?”
“As if I’d ever speak to those boys about a damn thing. They just love me.” He rolled his eyes in disdain. “They come to arrest me every time they find one of those poor girls or lost boys all cut up. Haven’t caught me yet. Seems they think us perverts are the same thing as killers.”
She gazed up at his olive skin painted with rouge. “I think they’re wrong.”
“Of course they’re wrong. I wouldn’t hurt a fly . . . unless that fly was seriously messin’ with me, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be littering the town with body parts for people to find.”
Ethel nodded. She’d seen plenty of street fights end in blood, but no pimp or hustler would take the time to cut up the body the way Flo had been cut. They’d just dump it in a swamp.
“But still they come lookin’ for me ’cause I’m the devil in a dress. Now, you wouldn’t believe how many of those police boys come down here lookin’ for a little gin Rickey after it gets dark, but no one wants to talk about that.”
“Do you know who the killer might be?”
“I might know somethin’.”
Ethel stopped browsing shoes. “Who is he?”
“It isn’t a he, sweetheart. It’s a them.”
CHAPTER 30
“State your name.”
“Ethel Ann Hoffman.” It wasn’t her real name, but the Ethel part was true enough.
“What would you like to report?” The clerk behind the window hardly looked up from her notepad, which was a good thing. Even with the new dress and secondhand shoes she’d bought off the pervert, she looked a fright. Her hair was an unwashed mess, and the dirt of Brother Wenger’s dungeon had found its way under her fingernails and into the callouses of her elbows and knees.
“I have information on the Torso Killer,” Ethel announced, half expecting the room to go still with anticipation.
No one even batted an eye. The intake room at the Second District sat half-full of drunks waiting to file their own reports. The clerk didn’t look up; she just repeated the question. “What would you like to report?”
It wasn’t the reception she’d been hoping for, but she lowered her voice anyway. “I saw two men dumping burlap sacks into the Cuyahoga last night.”
“And?”
“They were talking about some other fella that had given them the sacks full of meat and paid ’em a bottle of whiskey for their trouble.” She kept the payment of twenty dollars to herself. “This morning both of them fellas were dead.”
“So you’re reporting a homicide.” It wasn’t a question. The clerk’s pen just kept moving. “Where did you spot the bodies?”
“Shantytown near the West 3rd Street Bridge.”
This made the clerk raise her eyebrows at least. Ethel had heard through the local taverns that one of the Torso victims had been found near that exact spot. “Take a seat. I’ll see if we can free up somebody.”
“Wait.” Ethel stopped the glass window from closing. “I have an important message for the detective. The one investigating the Mad Butcher.”
The clerk lifted her tired eyes to the window. “You and everybody else, toots.”
“There isn’t just one Torso Killer.”
The clerk didn’t seem impressed. “Is that all?”
Ethel searched her brain for anything else useful Rickey had told her under the bridge. “Some of the bodies were meant to be found—they were set up on a stage for all to see. The others were different. And there were more, maybe hundreds, that will never be found.” She repeated the man’s cryptic words, laying each one out for the clerk to write down, trying not to think of the girl she’d heard screaming through the floor drain. Mary Alice.
“Do you have information regarding other victims?” The clerk’s pen kept moving, but she didn’t look up.
Ethel had asked the man in high heels the same thing. No, I don’t and I seriously doubt anyone ever will. That’s the joy of killing hobos and whores, honey. Nobody ever misses us. We’re strangers even to each other.
For a fleeting moment, she’d wondered if she was talking with the killer himself. He just laughed and waved a limp hand. If those police boys weren’t so obsessed with naked bodies and dirty, deviant sex, they wouldn’t be lookin’ at me. When pressed, he went on to say, You know perverts just as well as I do, sugar. They like what they like. They don’t vary their routine. Not like this so-called Butcher. If a man wants to see you kill a chicken, you better kill it for him the same way every time, am I right? This Butcher swaps women for boys, boys for men, then back to women. And old women too. It makes no sense. These killings aren’t about sex or perverts like little ol’ me . . .
“Do you know of other victims?” the clerk repeated, clearly losing patience.
“No.” Ethel decided to keep Rickey’s colorful remarks to herself. She could tell the woman on the other side of the glass didn’t believe a thing she’d said. “But I heard some things. Tell the detectives to check below the Harmony Mission. There are rooms, hidden rooms down there. I heard a woman screaming.”
“You mean the place where they print the Bibles?” The clerk finally looked up at Ethel with withering eyes. Apparently, she hadn’t heard this today.
“Yes.” Ethel ignored her. “They’ve got a hundred women holed up in there, women without families, and there are rooms below the basement. I was there. I saw them.”
“Uh-huh.”
Ethel squinted through the glass at the clerk scribbling down words in tightly packed lines, cursing herself that she couldn’t read any of it. For all she knew, the woman was writing out a detailed description of the old whore at her window so the cops could arrest her and throw her into an insane asylum.
When the pen stopped moving, the clerk muttered, “Take a seat. I’ll see who I can find,” and closed the window.
It was Ethel’s cue to leave. She’d done her bit filing the report, now it was the cops’ turn to do theirs. Odds were good they would spend more time investigating her than her claims, and she’d be damned if she was going to spend the next three days in lockup or send another pack of detectives to bother Rickey. She could only hope the right man go
t the message.
The rumble in her stomach echoed the dryness of her throat. Down West 25th Street, taverns were just setting out their signboards. She staggered over to McGinty’s and pushed her way through the door.
It was always midnight inside. The windows had been blackened with paint, only letting slivers of cloudy light into the smoky bar. She pulled up a stool.
“Jesus, Amber.” Mags behind the bar slapped a worn hand on the counter. “What the hell happened to you? You look like you’ve been taken out wet. You want the usual?”
She nodded and let her shoulders slump into the bar.
“You got cash this time?” The grizzled barmaid arched an eyebrow. In Ethel’s miserable days on Rowdy Row, she and Mags had reached an understanding. Mags would let her work the room as long as she had cash.
Ethel tossed two dollars onto the counter.
Mags slipped the bills into her register and filled up a glass with cheap wine, then barked, “Bangers and mash” through the narrow window to the kitchen in the back.
Ethel downed the drink in one go. Within a few seconds, warmth returned to her hands and feet, and the knots tying her up loosened. She tapped the counter and Mags refilled the glass.
Once the second glass was half-drunk, she could begin to contemplate what she’d do next. The situation felt all too familiar. No money. No home. No options. Her best bet would be to clean herself up in McGinty’s washroom and go out looking for a paying man. She downed the wine and surveyed the room. Half the time she could find one right there. At the moment, there was nothing but drunks and men dead below the waist, but it was still early.
“Mags?”
“Yeah?” The barmaid glanced up from the sink. From the worried look in the crone’s eye, Ethel could tell she was looking rough, and looking rough guaranteed that she’d only catch the worst sort of paying man. The sort that wouldn’t pay much for even the most despicable sort of thing. Her age kept her from the best money, but she hadn’t fallen to the bottom just yet.
“Can I use the washroom?”