The Unclaimed Victim

by D. M. Pulley

  “Over there.” Johnnie pointed at the front wall out into the street.

  Ethel brushed the poor girl’s cheek. “Will you show me?”

  Johnnie led her out the back door and up the side of the house. She eyed both ends of the narrow street before darting across the brick pavement to the alley behind the Harmony Mission. The back side of the burnt-out bungalow sat five doors down. The blood-red star on the broken door faced the bricks of the factory. Straight ahead was the boarded-up hardware store with a blank sign out front. The cellar entrance was covered with weathered shed doors slanting out of the ground. The latch was padlocked.

  “They went down there.”

  Ethel scanned the yards between the cellar doors back to the marked house and up at the tall brick wall of the factory behind her. She grabbed the young girl by the hand and walked her behind the houses until she’d come to the broken back door that led down to the dead place. The drunk on the second floor gave her pause. “Johnnie, do you know who’s sleeping upstairs?”

  “It’s just Hortie.” She shrugged.

  “You afraid of Hortie?”

  Johnnie shook her head.

  “Okay. I want you to go inside and stay out of sight. Don’t tell anybody what you told me, understand? The police are not your friends. We don’t know which ones we can trust, so don’t trust any of ’em.”

  Johnnie nodded in agreement.

  “Don’t tell anyone who your mother was. Not a soul. Not ever. Just say you don’t remember. Can you do that? Just lock her away in here.” Ethel patted the girl’s bony chest. “If I don’t come back for you by tomorrow, get as far away from here as you can. Catch out on a train. You hear?”

  A small tear fell down the little thing’s cheek.

  “You’re a strong girl. If you made it this far all by yourself, ain’t nothin’ can touch you, got me?” Ethel gripped Johnnie’s shoulders hard, knowing all too well what was waiting for the girl out there in the world. “You do what you gotta do to get by, okay? That’s what your mama would want. You’re gonna be fine.” It was a lie. Neither of them would ever be fine. Not in this world. Everyone knew the police could be bought, the mob owned half of ’em, but the idea that they were caught up in this . . .

  “What you gonna do?” the girl whispered.

  Ethel knew she should jump a train with Johnnie and get the hell out of town, but every town was the same town and she’d never done the right thing in her life. Not since her brother died anyway, and she learned that there was no justice in this world. No right. No wrong. Just kill or be killed, and she’d be damned if she let them get away with this. She’d be damned either way.

  She gave the girl a pained smile. “I’m going to kill the bastards that took your mom.”

  CHAPTER 41

  “Rickey!” Ethel hissed up the side of the bridge abutment. She climbed up the rubble slope to the concrete piers looking out over the city from under the shadow of the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Rickey!” she said louder, risking being heard by some other vagrant holed up in one of the scrap-metal shanties that dotted the tall grasses all the way down to the river. “Sugar, I got some hooch for you!”

  A face peeked out from the web of a giant steel girder. “Dirty Bedsheets, is that you?” A large pair of high heels emerged from the cover of the riveted steel plates and dropped down to the concrete. The beam of a flashlight blinded her while he checked her face and then clicked it off. He straightened his wine-colored evening dress and sauntered over. “That better not be some old rotgut.”

  “It’s Canadian.” She waggled the bottle at him. It had taken a hard half hour with the bartender in the alley behind McGinty’s.

  “To what do I owe this pleasure?” He cocked an eyebrow and held out a delicate hand.

  She put the bottle in it. “I need somethin’.”

  “Don’t we all?” He carefully inspected the label before unscrewing the cap and taking a healthy swig. “Hoo! That is nice. What is it you think I can do for you, darlin’?”

  “I need a gun.”

  He raised a pencil-thin eyebrow and took another drink.

  “And that flashlight.”

  “Then I sure as hell hope you have more to trade than this measly little bottle, sweetness.” He handed the bottle back to her and waved his hand at her like she must be crazy.

  “I know who killed Rose Wallace.”

  This got his attention. “And how’s that?”

  “I found the empty house where they did her. She heard somethin’ she wasn’t supposed to. A cop calling himself Kessler told her to hide out and wait. That night they came for her and hung her up from a meat hook.”

  Rickey let out a low whistle.

  “They found her body right around here. Ain’t that right?”

  “Yep. In a nasty burlap sack right down there. Soaked her in lime until there was nothin’ but bone left.” He grabbed the bottle back and took another drink. “Them cops have been tryin’ to pin that one on me ever since. Me and Rose was friends . . . How’d you find out where they did her?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She shot him a look. If he really knew Rose, he knew about Johnnie.

  He seemed to read her mind but just nodded. “Can you name names?”

  “Besides Kessler? No. Not yet. But I think I know where they’re gonna be.”

  “And you think a little gun is going to do the job? Shit, you are a nutter. If they got cops on the payroll, you haven’t got a chance.”

  “Maybe not, but how long can this keep goin’ before you and me end up swinging from a meat hook too?” Ethel hissed. “These people, whoever they are, they’re cowards. They figure if they kill nothin’ but passed-out drunks and working girls, no one will care. No one will fight back. They have no idea who they’re messin’ with now!”

  Rickey flashed an amused grin. “So if I give you a gun and this light . . . you’re gonna go in and kill them all?”

  Ethel shrugged. “Maybe I just need to kill one. Someone’s got to be in charge of all this, right?”

  “And what’s gonna happen to me when they find you floatin’ in the river? What’s gonna happen when they find my gun on your body? How long before they come for me?”

  She held up a hand. “I get caught, I don’t know you.”

  “Shit, honey. You don’t know me now. I am not looking to be a hero in your little crusade.” He turned away, shaking his head.

  “What about Rose?”

  “Rose is dead, honey. There’s nothing I can do about that.”

  “Aren’t you tired of all this? Business around here’s dried up. Nobody wants to pay top dollar for a throw when it might cost ’em their head. Coppers keep huntin’ you like a dog. Do you really think it’s gonna stop?”

  Rickey looked her dead in the eye. “No. I don’t . . . but there’ll always be a reason for the folks up there to lock us up. Torso Killer or not, I am not wanted here. And neither are you. They only want us in the dark when no one’s lookin’, and then when they’re finished with us, we’re supposed to disappear. We’re ghosts to them. They’d rather we all got cut up and thrown in the damn river just so they wouldn’t have to look at us in the daylight.”

  Ethel nodded in agreement. “If we want the killings to stop, we have to stop them ourselves.”

  Rickey held her murderous gaze for a moment, then stared out over the tall buildings on the other side of the river. “We won’t win. Even if you kill every single one of them, we won’t . . . We never do.”

  “They slaughtered her like an animal, Rickey. They turned her into meat.”

  “But isn’t that what we are to them? Meat?” He threw up his hands at her and sauntered back to his hideaway under the bridge. He wasn’t going to help her.

  Ethel wiped away a tear with angry hands and looked down into the river. Somewhere below the depths lay parts of a girl, butchered into pieces small enough to carry home from the market. It would be her one day.
If not from the knife of the Butcher, from the wear and tear of scraping by on her knees, bouncing from one hellhole to another, until they were all through with her. Ethel could already feel the weight of the water over her head. She felt herself sinking to the bottom of the river with the pieces of that poor girl. She could see the muted glow of the city lights floating high above the murky sewage and the runoff from the slaughterhouses.

  She took several shaking steps down the slope. Rickey’s voice stopped her.

  “I got this little beauty hot off an armed robbery.” He was holding a pistol with a worn handle. “I believe they used it to kill a cop, so be sure to lose it when you’re done.”

  She took the pistol from him and tested the weight of it in her hand. He placed the flashlight in the other.

  “Thanks, Rickey. I won’t forget this.”

  He flashed her a grin. “You bet your ass you’re gonna forget it, ’cause I know for certain that I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  She nodded.

  “Where’d you find the piece?” he asked, testing her.

  “In an abandoned house down on Thurman. It was lying in a puddle of blood.”

  “You know how to use that thing?”

  Ethel turned it over in her hand. The last time she’d held a gun, she’d ended up in the Mansfield workhouse for two years. She could still feel the kick of it and smell the gunpowder after it went off. She could still see her landlord’s face as he fell back into a puddle of his own blood and hear her brother screaming tears in the corner as they took her away in handcuffs. She never saw either one of them again. The bastard died in the hospital three weeks later, and her little brother was shipped downstate to an orphanage for disturbed children. The court ruled it aggravated manslaughter instead of murder out of horror for what the man had done to the ten-year-old boy. None of the jurors seemed all that concerned about what he’d done to her. The light sentence was her only consolation. Her brother killed himself six months before her release. “Yeah,” she whispered. “Yeah, I do.”

  Rickey held her eye for a beat, then turned to the skyline. He drew in a long, deep breath. “Don’t matter anyway. One of my boys down at the Second District tells me they’re raiding the jungles tonight, and they are arresting everybody. Eliot Ness himself has sworn to catch this Butcher, and after the body they found today, he is out of time. I’m catching out. If you have any sense at all, you’ll do the same.”

  Ethel scanned the skyline. “Where will you go?”

  “Anywhere but here, sugar. That’s the benefit of being a ghost, ain’t it? You can vanish and no one”—he shot her a pointed look—“will ever find you.”

  She shrugged off his warning and cocked a grin. “But you’re forgetting the other benefit of being a ghost.”

  “Really, darlin’? What’s that?” He smiled back.

  “No one ever sees you coming.”

  CHAPTER 42

  It was almost midnight when Ethel returned to the house where she’d left Johnnie. The mountain of a drunk the girl called Hortie lay snoring on the torn sofa in the living room with an empty bottle on the floor. Ethel scanned the room for signs of Johnnie, knowing she was there somewhere, hiding.

  “Johnnie,” she whispered. “Stay here. Go to sleep. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  She crept down the basement stairs to the root cellar with the pistol hidden in the hem of her skirt and the heavy metal flashlight in her hand. At the bottom of the narrow ladder, the hole in the root cellar wall was just where she’d left it. She wriggled her way into the narrow tunnel connecting the abandoned house to the catacombs below the Harmony Mission presses.

  As her head emerged from the long, narrow tomb, she heard a voice. Ethel clicked off the yellow beam of her flashlight and listened.

  “. . . ‘save me from all them that persecute me, and deliver me. Lest he tear my soul like a lion, rending it in pieces, while there is none to deliver.’” It was a young woman’s voice. She was weeping.

  Ethel pulled herself out of the narrow tunnel and crept toward the faint glow of candlelight at the far end of the hall lined with crypts.

  “‘Oh, Lord my God, if I have done this; if there be iniquity in my hands, if I have rewarded evil unto him that was at peace with me.’” The voice stopped and sobbed. Under it a low shushing sound paused, then started up again. “‘Let the enemy persecute my soul and take it; yea, let him tread down my life upon the earth . . .’”

  As Ethel approached the corner, the light grew brighter. She pulled the gun from the hem of her skirts and pressed her back to the wall. After two harried breaths, she risked a look.

  A woman was crouched on her knees with her back to the room and a scrub brush in her hand. The brush dipped into a bucket and went back to scouring the stone floor. The water was stained red. An enormous wooden cross hung from the wall over the woman’s head. The life-sized crucifix had been mounted upside down.

  The woman stopped scrubbing and shook with another sob. “‘Oh, let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end, but establish the just . . . ,’” she wailed. “‘My defense is of God, which saveth the upright in heart. God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day . . . every day.’”

  Ethel scanned the empty room. A metal table sat against the sidewall with a collection of large medical knives laid out according to size. The largest looked like a meat cleaver. The crying woman’s prayers echoed off the stone walls, and her head was bowed down to the tops of her red-stained hands.

  Ethel pointed the gun straight at the woman’s back and stepped out from her corner. “Where are they?” she demanded. “Where are the rest of them?”

  The woman turned, and the brush in her hands hit the ground with a hollow clack. The front of her plain blue dress was stained purple. A bruise darkened one of her swollen eyes. “Ambrosia? Is that you?” she squeaked.

  Ethel lowered the gun. “Mary Alice? What are you doing down here? Sweet Jesus. What did they do to you do?”

  Red marks darkened the poor girl’s neck as though she’d been choked. Her face had gone hollow and pale.

  “They were so angry you left. Why? Why did you come back?” Fresh tears spilled down the poor girl’s face.

  Ethel crouched down beside her. “Who did this to you? Was it Wenger? Where is he?”

  Mary Alice turned her shaking red hands over. Her eyes drifted up to the inverted cross.

  Ethel followed her eyes, then darted back to the bloody bucket. “Is he dead? Who killed him? You have to tell me, Mary Alice. Who is doing this?”

  The girl’s eyes darted around the empty room, and she shook her head.

  “It’s okay. You can tell me. Is it Reverend Milton?”

  “No . . . no it’s . . .” Her voice dropped below a whisper. “It’s the Legion.”

  “The what?” Ethel hissed. “Who are they?”

  Mary Alice shrank into herself and began to tremble. “They’re everywhere, listening. You shouldn’t be here.”

  “We have to get you out of here. C’mon. Let’s get you up.” Ethel stood and pulled the dazed girl up by the arms. She nearly slumped right back over. Ethel grabbed her by the hand and waist and led her back down the dark hallway toward the passage to the root cellar. “We have to get you to the detective. He’ll listen to you. You’re a real person to them. An honest person. You need to tell them what you saw.”

  As the hall grew darker, Ethel grew less certain which of the catacombs led back out. She glanced over her shoulder at Mary Alice’s pale face then the empty corridor before pulling the flashlight out of her cleavage and clicking it on. She shined the light into full and empty graves, crouching as she went. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, letting go of Mary Alice to search. “There’s a way out. I just have to find it.”

  “Jesus, I beg thee to walk these steps with me,” Mary Alice whispered. “To guide my head. To guide my hand. Jesus, be with me.”

  “Here!” Ethel shined her light into an
empty tomb. “It’s right h—”

  A hard crack to the back of Ethel’s head knocked the words from her mouth. A flash of white blinded her as the room crashed to the floor.

  BLAMES SLAYING ON FREIGHT RIDER

  A murderer who rides freight trains and is a pervert was responsible for the killing of the victim found in “Murder Swamp” near New Castle, Pa., and for at least several of the Cleveland torso murders, Police Detective Peter Merylo said yesterday upon his return from the Pennsylvania city with the other Cleveland officers sent there to seek possible links with torso cases here.

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 16, 1939, p. 3

  CHAPTER 43

  April 10, 1999

  “Oh, God! Oh, God! Where are we going?” Kris’s hands were shaking so hard she could barely grip the wheel as they went careening down West Hume Road.

  “Pull in there.” Jimmy pointed to Shirlene’s Diner. The breakfast crowd was thin that morning. “We have to ditch this car. Pull up in the back.”

  “Okay.” Kris brought the Jeep to a rumbling stop next to the grease trap behind the dumpster and out of sight of the restaurant windows and road. “What do you mean we have to ditch the car?”

  “I just pointed a fucking shotgun at a white boy. The second we left the house, he called the cops. I guarantee it. And I’m pretty sure he left out the part where he smacked you around. They’re gonna be lookin’ for us.” Jimmy took off his shirt and began wiping down the car door handle and dashboard. “They’re probably setting roadblocks now.”

  Kris frowned at him cleaning the steering wheel while the word fingerprints slowly formed in her head. In the rearview mirror, she could see the bruise on her cheek forming where Troy had smacked her. It would be so much easier for Ben to believe Jimmy had done it. “He’ll say you kidnapped me. Oh, shit! What are we gonna do?”

  Jimmy took in a slow breath and gazed out the window toward the train tracks on the other side of the chain-link fence at the back of the lot. Two dilapidated boxcars sat behind it above a ditch. “You get junk trains through here?”