Trail of Blood

by Lisa Black

  “I understand. Besides, you can’t leave this crime scene unsecured,” she told him. “However, I can.”

  She walked to her car before he could argue, feeling fairly sure he wouldn’t shoot her. Fairly sure. She hastily threw too much money to the young woman in the tollbooth for the half hour of parking and turned right on Orange, Fourteenth, then East Twenty-second. Down to Broadway, turn right. Once upon a time this area had been referred to as the Roaring Third, a rough conglomeration of bars and tenements. Her great-grandfather would have known that.

  In the sparse grass north of Broadway as it intersected with Orange, she found it.

  “We could have caught the killer,” Theresa complained to her cousin an hour later, “if that kid had come here when I told him to.”

  “Wasn’t an option. He couldn’t leave a dead body unattended. Besides, the killer could have dropped this off and been back in his car in ten seconds. He was probably halfway home by the time you found the first body—the first pieces of the body.” Frank straightened up, towering over her and her find, his back to the phalanx of mobile news vans corralled behind the yellow tape. Their lights nearly blinded her, but she could see Brandon Jablonski front and center, his gaze fixed on her.

  “We could have caught him,” she said again. A gust of cool wind hit her face with no effect upon her internal temperature. They’d been so close.

  Frank showed her no sympathy. “He could have caught you, wandering around like that. Or any of the other assorted killers, rapists, and general miscreants that roam this city after dark. What were you thinking?”

  Angela Sanchez had gone to the post office building to see if they had outdoor cameras that might have caught the killer’s brief stop by the side of the road. Two officers, armed with small but brilliant lights, combed the grass, but Theresa doubted they would find anything. The killer most likely placed one milk crate, made the twenty-foot walk back to his car, and did the same to the second. No dirt to retain tire tracks or shoeprints, no reason to hang around dropping a cigarette or a bloody glove.

  Theresa said, “I was thinking this guy has to go to certain places to live out his little fantasy of re-creating the Torso Murders. All we have to do is be there. He should be the easiest killer to catch in the history of forensics and instead he drove right past us!”

  “Don’t shout,” Frank warned her, jerking his chin at the reporters. “Those guys have parabolic mikes. But at least now we know he apparently plans to complete all twelve murders in twelve days. I won’t have any trouble getting the manpower we need to get him tomorrow night. It’s not too late.”

  “It’s too late for her,” Theresa said, nodding at the victim’s calf. It protruded from the milk crate like a prop from the kind of late-night movie only bored teenagers watch.

  “I can see that,” Frank snapped. “What is here? I mean—”

  “The upper half of a female torso, the lower halves of both legs, and the left arm. Exactly what we should have. He’s read all the books.”

  “No head?”

  “The cops in ’36 never found Flo Polillo’s head.”

  “Is that newspaper?”

  After photographing the milk crate and its contents from every possible angle, Theresa had removed the arm and laid it in the clean body bag Don Delgado brought from the office. “Yesterday’s Plain Dealer. It should be both the Plain Dealer and last year’s issue of the Cleveland News, but of course the News has been defunct since 1960.”

  “Any ID so far?”

  “There won’t be. No wallet, no jewelry, not a scrap of clothing. They identified Flo Polillo—one of only three of his victims positively identified—by her fingerprints.”

  “Maybe we’ll do the same. It worked on Kim Hammond.”

  “I don’t know.” A cool dampness worked its way through her pants as she knelt over the palm, examining the skin with a halogen flashlight. “Nails are neat and conservative, no polish. No track marks. She’s healthy but older.”

  “You can tell that from her fingernails?”

  She cracked a smile for the first time that evening. “No, the arm itself. We show our age in the elbows and knees. You can exercise, eat right, get plastic surgery, but the elbows and knees will always betray you.”

  She unwrapped the next piece. The killer had cut through the leg at the hip and the knee, leaving the two ends of the femur only slightly damaged. Theresa closed her eyes, opened them. In this job she did not have the luxury of turning away.

  “He did that neatly,” Frank said, his voice sounding oddly strangled.

  “He did it carefully,” she said, correcting him, forcing herself to examine the flesh. “Not neatly. He made numerous cuts into the skin, leaving the edges ragged. Then he got through the tendons and cartilage with some kind of saw, I think.”

  “Handsaw or electric?” Frank still sounded oh-so-deliberately casual. Behind him she could hear the murmur of the paparazzi shouting questions to anyone who came near them.

  “I can’t tell. We need Christine for that. But he took chips out of the bone to get it done. It looks neat because he washed it all up so well. There’s no blood. He let the body drain, then cleaned the pieces. He probably even dried them because the paper didn’t stick too much.”

  Frank coughed.

  She frowned at him. “You’re not going to throw up in my crime scene, are you?”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. Notice the paper?”

  “Yeah, it’s—” She looked down. In the too-bright light she recognized the photograph that had been rolled around the victim’s thigh. Herself, standing on the hillside below 4950 Pullman, her head bent toward a flash of white skin on the ground. It had been taken the evening before by some reporter with a quality telephoto lens.

  “This guy could be sending you a message, Tess.”

  “I doubt it.” At her cousin’s snort she added hastily, “He’s throwing this series of murders together day by day and we have only one newspaper in town. It’s not like he had a choice.”

  “Could have used the Beacon Journal,” Frank grumbled.

  She took the illogic of this as a measure of his agitation. “The Torso killer used Cleveland papers. Akron wouldn’t count. Relax, cuz. He doesn’t kill another woman for four or five more murders yet.”

  “Oh, comforting. So tomorrow’s victim will be a man?”

  “Yeah. His head will be rolled up in his pants and his body found about a thousand feet away.”

  “The Tattooed Man. Yeah, I remember. Where did he turn up again?”

  “Back near Jackass Hill, in the valley under the East Fifty-fifth Street bridge. Within sight of 4950 Pullman.”

  Frank lit a cigarette, striking the match too hard and breaking it. He put the ends in his pocket and used a second one. “Then we’ll get him there. I’ll have every cop in Cleveland in that valley, from side to side. He won’t get away this time.”

  She didn’t want to pile on, knowing how awful he felt, but the dead pieces of flesh before her forced her to point it out: “There’s a man out there right now to whom that will come as no comfort.”

  CHAPTER 29

  SUNDAY, JANUARY 26

  1936

  Sunday mornings were quiet in the cathouse business. No customers, and the staff catching up on their rest after the busy Saturday-night trade. Consequently doors were opened to James and Walter only after a long wait and then by lined faces with tousled hair, faces none too happy to find cops on the doorstep but especially unhappy to be awakened earlier than usual on such a frigid day.

  The first such madam they encountered told them so in no uncertain terms. Police were usually made welcome in exchange for their lack of enforcement of standing vice laws and a phoned tip whenever they were forced to make a raid in order to let the public think that cops occasionally did their jobs. Apparently the madam felt different rules applied in the harsh light of day, or she was just too tired to care. “What do you want? Get the hell off my doorstep. Oh, come in, or I’
ll freeze to death right in this doorway, with all the neighbors staring.”

  “As if you care what your neighbors think, Rosie,” Walter said, stamping the snow from his shoes onto the welcome mat in a show of politeness.

  Rosie had deep lines in her face, a mouth set like granite, and a man’s figure. A strong man. “I do. Some of them are my best customers. What do you want, this early on a Sunday? I know it ain’t a visit with one of my girls, or you wouldn’t have brought him along.”

  She meant James, with an inflection that made it sound as if he came from outer space. Did everyone in town know him as the police department oddity, the bum who can’t figure out what’s good for him?

  Walter said, “Rosie, I got one question and one question only. Answer it and we’ll be on our way and you can get back to your beauty sleep. Are you missing a girl?”

  The woman blinked at him, then the sleepiness cleared. “Why, you found one? You got a girl in jail? You got her, you keep her, she’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “Rosie, just tell me if you’re short a girl, that’s all. No trouble for you, I promise.”

  “Hah,” she said before turning away. “That makes me feel a lot better, the word of a chizz.”

  When she had climbed the creaking stairs with the threadbare rose-patterned runner, James turned to his partner. “I see you two have met.”

  “So have you. Remember, we arrested two of her girls last year for rolling that drunk at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. At least it’s warm in here.”

  “I suppose it has to be, since most of the people in it are undressed at any given time.”

  “Can’t have the clients catching cold,” Walter said in agreement.

  “A cold would be the least of my worries,” James said. Upstairs, he could hear the groans and protests as Rosie went from room to room, rousing the prostitutes.

  It did not take long. The madam thumped back down the steps and said to Walter, “They’re all here.”

  “Every girl is accounted for? It’s really important—”

  “I got fifteen girls in this house, and all fifteen are upstairs in their beds. Now go away and let me get back to mine.” She opened the door, hiding behind it to avoid the arctic blast from the street. “And don’t come back unless it’s paying business. You used up a free time with this little stunt.”

  Walter grinned his chubby little-boy grin. “I’d be upset if I thought you meant that.”

  “Out.”

  Out they went, and climbed into the freezing car. Walter gave a shiver as he started it up. “Isn’t she a dilly? Her place sure looks a lot different during the day.”

  “Let that be a lesson to you.”

  Walter laughed. “Yeah, yeah. You should come by here sometime, when Helen gets on your nerves. Rosie’s girls will do you right. They even play that Negro music you like.”

  “Ragtime.”

  “Yeah.”

  They repeated the process at three more cathouses before two detectives from the Third Precinct caught up with them. They could stop waking prostitutes; even without a head, the dead woman had been identified by her fingerprints. James found that impressive. Those Bertillon unit guys did some interesting stuff.

  “She’s a drunk named Flo Polillo,” they were told by one of the detectives. “The Bertillon unit had her prints from a prostitution arrest. Didn’t work at it steady, though, either waitressed in gin mills or mooched off any man she could get, not that she could have gotten a lot. I saw her mug shot. Forty-one and she looked sixty. Your captain’s at her place,” the detective added, and gave them the address. “We’re heading to the Feather Company over on Central. That’s where the burlap bags came from.”

  “And I’ll bet you’re just tickled,” Walter said.

  “Ain’t you a gas.”

  James and Walter climbed back into the car. Any heat the engine built up inside instantly dissipated in the cold and they had to wait for it to warm again before driving to Flo Polillo’s apartment at 3205 Carnegie Avenue. A fretting landlady let them in.

  The shabby little room bulged with cops, but at least their gathered bulks warmed the air. Whatever her lifestyle, Flo Polillo had kept her place neat, with a dozen dolls arranged on the bed and bureau. Their tiny black eyes seemed to follow the activities of the men. James got the idea that even if the toys could talk, they would choose not to. Dolls could not be killed, could not suffer.

  He and Walter found the captain at a small desk, poring over a notebook full of scrawls while an officer from the Bertillon unit crouched next to the radiator and poked with one hand at a tray of debris he held in the other. James detoured over to the metal pipes, which kept the room at a comfortable temperature. Picturing the city as a map, James figured that the body had been found about a mile away. Flo would not have willingly left her warm apartment to walk to her death on such a cold night. Her killer must have had a car.

  He asked the cop, “What have you got?”

  The Bertillon unit guy looked up through glasses perched on a red and running nose. “Bunch of nothing I swept up from the floor. Dirt. A button. Piece of wood.” He rubbed the half-inch sliver between his fingers and sniffed at the residue. “Smells like creosote. Coal tar.”

  “That’s used in railroad ties, isn’t it?”

  “And electrical poles, and roads with wood bricks, and floors in most factories, and docks. Any place they want to preserve the wood.”

  “You think it’s from the killer?”

  The guy sniffled and dropped the sliver of wood back into the tray next to the white flower-shaped button. “Sure. Or the victim. Or her landlady. Or off the shoes of one of the twenty cops who walked around in here before I swept. I don’t believe the killer ever came here. There’s no blood in the place, not on the carpet, not in the bathtub or sink. I’d like to see him cut up a body like that without blood.”

  “What if he washed it up?”

  “It’s not like a shaving nick. The benzidine would still find traces, with that much being splashed around.” He gestured to a wooden case that lay open on the floor. “It’s a chemical, turns blue when it comes in contact with blood. Then we could do another test to find out what type the blood is—A or B or—”

  “I know,” James said. “We had a tour through your lab once.”

  “Hey,” Walter called.

  James thanked the cop, left him to his tray of dirt, and returned to his partner’s side.

  Their superior did not look pleased to see them, but he hadn’t looked pleased before he saw them, either. James could swear that the man’s bald spot expanded and contracted in response to stress. Right now it seemed to be pushing the fringe of brown hair out until it crowded his ears and forehead like a flapper’s bandeau. “What are you doing here?” the captain asked as he flipped through the small journal.

  “Came to help,” Walter said.

  “Well, ain’t you the Boy Scouts.”

  “What did they find on the body?” James asked.

  “That her diary?” Walter asked.

  “No, it’s her money—she made three payments to a doctor named Manzella—and wages, at least the legal ones. This hag worked as a barmaid and waitress in about six different restaurants and juice joints. I’m going to need you to hit every one and question the owner, the busboy, delivery clerks, each and every customer. Got it?”

  “Right, Cap.”

  “What was found on the body?” James asked again.

  The captain gave him a considering look, the kind that usually preceded the comment that perhaps James would be happier in another precinct, but he said only, “Newspapers—yesterday’s News and the Plain Dealer from a day last August. Dog hairs. Fur, I mean, but then that’s who made the initial report, so to speak. Found by a dog. Hell of an epitaph. Besides that there was coal dust and cinders, like maybe she’d been laying on lump coal at some point and it left dents in the skin.”

  “A coal car,” James said promptly. “He killed her down
by the tracks, like the other two, and carted her back up here in pieces. He hid the pieces in a coal car until he could go back for them. The coal would absorb the blood and the stains wouldn’t show against the black lumps.”

  “Great, Miller. By the way, what’s your house heated with?”

  James’s flow of words hit a bottleneck. “Coal.”

  “And it’s kept where?”

  “In the coal cellar.”

  “Great place to hide a body, wouldn’t it be?”

  “Yeah. But, Cap—”

  “And the other guys weren’t killed by the tracks, were they? Just dumped.”

  “We think that because there weren’t any pools of blood by the rails. But that could explain what happened to it—he killed them in the coal car, which then rode out of town.”

  “Except he didn’t only get rid of their blood, he washed it off the bodies as well. And we didn’t find any coal or cinders on those two dead guys. Aside from the heads coming off, I see more things different than the same here. The first time, the guy obviously had a sex problem with men, he only took the head off and didn’t cover or wrap the bodies in anything. No newspaper, no coal. This time the doc says the cuts were neat—like a doctor or a butcher—but he wrenched the bones apart like he was in some kind of fit.”

  Walter made a face and clutched his stomach. “Don’t think about upchucking here, McKenna,” the captain warned him. “It’s got to be some kind of crazy doctor. Who else would know how to do something like that neatly?”

  “Someone who’s practiced it,” James said, thinking aloud. “Helen’s squeamish about most everything, but she can debone a chicken in minutes with a few quick slices.”

  “You think your wife’s killing people, Miller?” the captain asked without a smile.

  “She grew up on a farm and got good at certain things. Maybe this guy did, too.”

  “Nah,” Walter said. “A chicken’s a lot different than a person, and a doctor would have the equipment, the workroom, a car to dump the bodies—”

  “Maybe,” the captain said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “But this lady wasn’t no society Jane, if you catch my drift. She couldn’t have afforded no doctor with a car. No, I’m guessing this bitch got on the wrong side of a boyfriend who’ll have a line of arrests going back to when he wore short pants. How he learned to cut up bodies, we can ask him when we arrest him. So get out there and find out who she’s been making whoopee with. You two ever find the source of that blue coat from the two guys on the hill?”