by D. M. Pulley
“Help yourself.”
The sight of herself in the bathroom mirror knocked Ethel back. The shape she was in, she’d be lucky to catch a railroad tramp. There were cuts on her knees and the palms of her hands. Dirt and dried blood were smeared across her hairline. She locked the door and stripped off her dress only to see bruises on her arms and back from where Wenger had thrown her down. She scrubbed the grime from her elbows and face and shook the dirt out of her hair. She wiped her teeth with the inside fabric of the dress and doused herself with the cheap perfume Mags kept handy for the working girls.
Even with all her efforts, odds were good she’d be sleeping under the bridge with the pervert that night.
Back at the bar, more of the stools had filled up with the lunchtime crowd. A pack of union organizers sat at the round table in the back with steins of beer. Steelworkers from the foundry and longshoremen from the loading docks bellied up to the bar. After years in the game, Ethel could guess which of the men were faithfully married and which of them liked whores. An off-duty policeman nursed a beer in the back of the room, but even in plain clothes, he was easy to spot.
Ethel sidled up next to a man wearing a clean suit and reached for another glass of wine. She could tell by his hands and the cut of his jaw he worked in one of the factories. Maybe a foreman. “Excuse me,” she murmured and flashed him a smile.
He grunted and turned back to his friend.
Not one to give up that easily, she slid back onto her stool and waited for another opening.
“. . . and the son of a bitch turned me down. Can you believe that? I been banking there for fifteen years and can’t get a Goddamned loan.”
“You can’t trust the Jews, Hansel. I keep telling you this,” his friend answered in a thick accent. Maybe Russian. “They are driving this country into the ground! They won’t stop until we’re all in the poorhouse. It’s part of their plan, you know. That’s how they took over Russia. Starved the people, ran them out of business until they were like dogs willing to obey. You think the stock market crash was an accident?”
“I don’t know, Karl. You just work all your life, right? And what’ve you got to show for it?” Hansel downed his beer in one angry swig. “It’s Goddamn criminal is what it is.”
“Criminal is exactly right. Hitler saw this and he arrested them. Finally, some justice in this world.”
“I don’t know about all that.” Hansel shook his head and tapped the bar for another beer.
“You just wait,” Karl pressed. “Wait until those dregs down by the river rise up and start burning our houses and killing our children and then tell me Hitler was wrong. I saw what happened when the Bolsheviks started rioting. I was there. That labor strike was just the beginning. An entire army is just sitting down there in camps, waiting for their orders. The poor are organizing against us. And what are we doing? We are sitting here drinking beer and waiting for them to come and slit our throats!”
Karl slipped a folded pamphlet across the counter toward his hesitant friend. A drawing of the devil danced through a six-pointed Star of David. Ethel frowned at the jumble of letters shouting along the top, Beware the 12 Signs of the Jewish Revolution! She couldn’t read them, but she recognized the devil and the Jewish star.
Hansel studied the cover and shot his friend a frown.
“Be careful where you read that,” Karl warned. “And lock the doors or else you might be tempted to go out and shoot every last Jew you see. Keep your eyes open, my friend. The revolution is coming, and it will start along the river.”
Ethel stared into her wine, seeing the murky brown waters of the Cuyahoga at the bottom of her glass. The sound of heavy burlap sacks being tossed into the depths by two bumbling drunks was still fresh in her ears. The idea that those two idiots were the seeds of a revolution was utterly laughable. They’d been too stupid to suspect the free hooch they’d been given by a killer might be laced.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hansel stuff the bedeviled leaflet into his pocket. His hateful friend was right about one thing. The shantytowns along the rivers were drowning in misery. No one down in the jungles trusted the politicians, the landlords, the bosses, or the police to save them. Not from their poverty or the slashing knife of the Mad Butcher.
Ethel studied the two angry men downing their beers, and Rickey’s gold tooth gleamed at her from the corner of her mind. It isn’t a he, sweetheart. It’s a them.
EIGHTH CITY TORSO VICTIM IDENTIFIED
East Side Woman Traced by Bridgework in Skeleton
. . . As Cleveland detectives worked for a clew which might direct them to Cleveland’s latest torso death, Detective Peter Merylo yesterday disclosed that the bridgework of a woman’s skeleton found under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge in June, 1937, the eighth torso victim, had been positively identified as that of Mrs. Rose Wallace, 40, of 2027 Scoville Avenue S. E.
—Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 11, 1938, p. 5
CHAPTER 31
April 9, 1999
Kris, Jimmy, and Madame Mimi all stood on Thurman Avenue, studying the bizarre eight-pointed star painted on Kris’s front door. A light rain drizzled down as they stood there in the cold April morning.
“Have you ever seen one of these before?” Madame Mimi turned her bloodshot eyes to Kris. They looked stoned and it wasn’t even noon. “Growing up maybe?”
Kris puzzled at it for a minute. “I don’t know. Maybe . . . ?” Then the image came to her—lying in bed, tracing the stitching in her blanket with her finger, feeling the tiny holes for loose threads, pulling one apart so she could feel the batting underneath. “I had a quilt with stars like that. They were like flowers in all different colors. My grandma made it, I think.”
Madame Mimi nodded. “It was your father’s mother.”
Kris frowned. She hated parlor tricks. “Yeah. It was.”
“She was German?”
“Pennsylvania Dutch. My dad said something once about going to visit the old country someday. I think my great-grandparents were from Austria.”
Madame Mimi studied Kris’s dark hair and amber eyes. “But your mother wasn’t. What was she? Greek? Italian?”
“I’m not sure.” Kris shifted her weight nervously. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
Madame Mimi’s eyes shifted from Kris to Jimmy and then back to the door. “Let’s go inside.”
Kris unlocked the door and let them both in. There was no sign that Pete had been back. The police report sat in the same spot on the kitchen counter. The dirty dishes were still in the sink. If Madame Mimi had been anyone else, Kris would’ve been embarrassed.
“Where’s the basement?” Mimi asked.
“Uh . . . over here.” Kris led them both behind the kitchen to the back door and the door to the stairs.
“Have you checked this?” Jimmy tapped the back door.
Kris shook her head.
“Let’s take a look.” He unhooked the security chain and dead bolt and forced the door open. The overgrown backyard was a postage stamp that backed into the patio of Edison’s Pub. Another red star dripped down the back door—two squares superimposed and shifted forty-five degrees. Kris lifted the camera hanging from her neck and snapped another picture.
Mimi studied the star for a moment, then shut the back door and opened the slimmer one on the opposite wall that led down to the basement. A damp, earthy smell greeted them as they headed down the rickety wooden staircase and into the wreckage of old house parts her slumlord was keeping for a rainy day. The floor joists hung between the rough stone walls were so low they had to duck.
Madame Mimi batted away the strings of cobwebs as she made her way around the broken stove at the foot of the steps and across the dirt floor between the boxes to the nearest wooden support post. She grabbed it with her left hand and closed her eyes.
Kris shot Jimmy a glance.
He held up a finger that told her to wait.
The basement reeked of mildew and old
age. Boxes and wood crates were stacked together under at least ten years of dust, utterly forgotten. They were probably full of the cast-off baby pictures and photo albums of whatever sad, lonely person had lived there thirty years ago.
Mimi’s voice broke the silence. “One of them died here.”
“One of who?” Kris whispered, but Jimmy grabbed her arm and shook his head.
“They killed some of them in these houses.” Mimi continued as though talking to herself. “It was an open house. Open and empty. The mark was on the door . . . it lured them in.”
Kris shot Jimmy another look, but he didn’t notice. His eyes circled the floorboards overhead. A dark stain spread out over the underside of the planks not far from where Mimi stood. It darkened the wood with radiating lines where liquid had pooled and dried. It collected in the joints between the boards and ran to the lowest point in the floor. The marks stretched out across an area over five feet in diameter, far too large to be a pet stain.
A large dog could’ve done it, Kris argued with herself. Revulsion crept into her gut as she counted the number of times she’d sat on the kitchen floor in that exact same spot, talking on the phone, twirling the springy cord between her fingers. It never smelled of urine. The dark crust between the floorboards tinged the wood black and purple.
“It was the gypsies they wanted. The nonbelievers. The sinners,” Mimi continued. “The next day they came back with buckets to wash the wood.”
For a fleeting moment, Kris could see how the water would have dripped down between the boards. She could hear the brushes shushing back and forth.
The old stoned woman opened her eyes. She put a hand on a locked trunk sitting on the ground. “There was more than one. This place isn’t safe. We should go . . . Kris?” She turned to her. “Don’t leave the gun here.”
Kris’s mouth fell open to protest, but Madame Mimi was already heading up the stairs. Logical explanations fired off in her head. The old bat had broken into her house. She was probably the one who’d marked up her doors in the first place. And stolen her father’s photograph from her room.
When she reached the kitchen, she shot a glance through the living room and saw the shotgun lying out plain as day on the floor next to her bed for all to see. It didn’t take a psychic to figure out that the gun was hers.
“You got a permit for that?” Jimmy asked, waving toward it.
“Not exactly.” She flushed and scurried down the hall to snatch it up off the floor. Didn’t she leave it under the bed? she wondered, shoving it back into its felt sleeve. “It’s my dad’s. He’s a hunter and has a bunch of them, and he thought . . .”
“He thought his sweet little girl could use some protection in the big, bad city.” Jimmy nodded and she couldn’t tell if he agreed with her dad or thought she’d been spawned by rednecks.
“I had to humor him.” She shrugged apologetically and stuffed the gun into her old softball bag.
“You know how to use it?” Jimmy raised an eyebrow at her.
“Well . . . yeah.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here.” Jimmy pulled her toward the front door. Madame Mimi was already outside, looking up and down Thurman Avenue.
“Wait.” Kris stopped in the open door. “I still don’t understand any of this. You’re saying somebody was killed in here?”
“Is that so hard to believe?” Jimmy laughed and pulled her through the door and onto the curb. “You saw the stain. I mean, look around you, this neighborhood wasn’t always this nice.”
“Yeah but . . .” The boarded-up hardware store stood on the corner, looking like a crack den. The entire conversation was giving her the willies. She strained to focus as the cold rain dotted her face. “I don’t mean to be crass, but don’t people die all the time? It’s an old house. An old lady could’ve just keeled over. It might’ve taken weeks for someone to find her. That would’ve left a big mess, right? It could happen to anybody.”
Madame Mimi just stared at her with those stoned eyes until Kris was convinced she’d just put a curse on herself for speaking the awful words out loud.
“I mean, God forbid.” Kris knocked on the wood frame around the door to undo the jinx.
Mimi cracked a smile. “Don’t worry about saying the wrong thing. It doesn’t work that way.”
“I still don’t understand what the heck this star is supposed to mean or why someone would put it on my door.”
“The octogram has been used for centuries,” Madame Mimi explained and pulled the door shut. “It was used by the pagans, then the Christians to demark different things. Rebirth, renewal, some considered it a hex sign and a shield against the devil . . . most famously it was a symbol of baptism.”
“So what are you saying? Someone wants to baptize me?” Kris was fairly certain it had been done already, back when she was small. Not that she’d remember. Her father kept a Bible in the house, but they never really discussed it.
“No. The person that left this doesn’t understand the Bible or history enough to understand the ritual of baptism. The practice started centuries before Jesus when the Jews would immerse themselves in water to cleanse their souls before praying. No. The person that left this was thinking of the first baptism discussed in the Christian Bible. Do you know the story?”
“Uh . . . no. I didn’t really go to Sunday school.” Her father had avoided church altogether. God and I have an understanding, he’d say.
“John the Baptist cleansed Jesus of his sins in the River Jordan. John sought to rid all the Jews of their sins by baptizing them in preparation for the coming kingdom of heaven.”
“Okay?” This is ridiculous. Kris shook her head and locked the vandalized door. “What in the world is the ‘coming kingdom of heaven’?”
“The end of the world.” Madame Mimi smiled as if this explained everything.
“So?”
“Do you know what happened to John the Baptist?”
“What the hell is this? Religious Jeopardy?” Kris threw up her hands. “No, okay? I don’t know what happened to John the Baptist.”
It was Jimmy who answered. He nodded at Mimi like he’d just found a missing piece to a puzzle. “They cut off his head.”
CHAPTER 32
“So what are you saying? Someone wants to cut off my head?”
“I’m not saying nothin’.” Jimmy held up his hands and shot Mimi a look. “But every single one of the Torso Killer’s victims had their head cut clean off.”
The stolen police schematic Lowjack had posted online had shown the victim’s neck cut in a broken red line and his head crossed out. Kris felt an uncontrollable rage rising up in her chest. “So whoever did this is trying to intimidate me with a biblical threat? Announce the second coming of the holy Torso Killer? What?”
“We should get off the street.” Madame Mimi pulled Kris gently by the arm. “Whoever did this is sending a message . . . and not just to you.”
Kris hauled the softball bag stuffed with her father’s shotgun all the way back to Jimmy’s apartment in silence, trying to process every horrifically ridiculous thing she’d heard. A person had died in her house. That was the only part that seemed clear. Whether the poor sap had just keeled over watching Wheel of Fortune or had been hacked up and memorialized in the Torso Killer hall of fame was a question she didn’t even want to entertain.
Back in Jimmy’s apartment, Madame Mimi climbed the steps and went directly down the hall, past Jimmy’s bedroom, and through the next open door, with Kris and Jimmy trailing behind.
At the doorway, he stopped and turned to her. “I should probably tell you that . . .” He hesitated as though picking his words with care. “We’ve been trying to map how the Torso Killer is connected to this building and the Harmony Mission ever since Mimi felt it. It’s sort of a hobby . . . like the séances. I just don’t want you to be . . . freaked out.”
Frowning, Kris peeked over his shoulder into the room. Black-and-white photographs of severed body parts were taped to
the walls. Names and dates were written under each one. A map of Cleveland dotted with colored thumbtacks hung next to a broken window.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she whispered, stepping into the room despite herself. It looked like the serial killer’s crime lab in a Hollywood slasher movie. Her horrified eyes fell to Jimmy and she took a step back. Liar. “What the . . .”
He held up his hands in self-defense. “Hey. It’s not what you think. We’re not ‘murder groupies,’ alright? We’re here for the victims.”
Mimi’s back hovered near a grainy photograph of a chewed-up section of an arm and a leg. The writing on the wall labeled it July 6, 1937, John Doe VII, Dismembered Body Pulled Out of the River, Head Never Found.
“It might have been him,” Mimi murmured. “He was a hobo. He rode the rails in from somewhere near . . . St. Louis, looking for work. He could’ve seen the mark and thought he’d found an open safe house.”
“A what?” Kris snapped. Her thoughts were spinning too fast to have patience with Mimi’s bullshit.
“Hobos left signs. Little pictographs for each other. Get bread here. Talk about Jesus for a free meal there. That sort of thing. Safe houses were empty spots where they could bed down for the night. Hex signs mean different things to different people. It might’ve been a sign of welcome.”
“So you’re saying that . . .” The black-and-white severed body parts were hard to imagine as a living, breathing man. “That guy there slept in my house?”
“Maybe.” Mimi stood for another minute, then shook her head. She moved past the photo to another one—a photograph of blackened bones. A photograph of a woman’s face was taped next to them. “No. It was a woman.”
Kris rolled her eyes. “And you think this Torso Killer came in and killed her.”
“That’s assuming there was just one of them,” Jimmy said. He walked over to the photograph of the woman. The name Rose Wallace was written on the wall below it. “If you look at the forensics—or what passed for forensics back then—the odds are good there was more than one killer.”