Trail of Blood

by Lisa Black

  “A typical drunk, Flo,” the owner of Mike’s tavern near Central told them. “One day she’d be down in the dumps, sayin’ nobody in the world cared about her, so what did it matter if she drank herself to death. Then she’d go to St. Peter’s and get all inspired with the do-gooders there, decide to reform. Sure I can’t interest you in another sandwich? Best corned beef in the city.” He gave what seemed like a relieved sigh when Walter turned down the offer.

  At least all the free food put Walter in a good enough mood to trot up the steps of the church without hesitation. As a good Irishman he went to Mass as often as his wife could drag him, and the fortresslike exterior did not daunt him.

  James followed with less enthusiasm. He had not set foot in a church since returning from Europe. He had not made a conscious decision about it; without his mother to coerce him, he had simply stopped going. Helen rarely went herself, and then only as a social event.

  Once inside, he discovered that he still liked churches, the soaring arches overhead, the glass pictures that glowed even in the cold winter light, the quiet. Especially the quiet.

  They found the priest in the vestry. Father Donatello had wasted no time in removing the vestments and adding a heavy sweater and then a coat. When he spoke, his breath misted. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

  They explained the need to retrace Flo Polillo’s steps.

  “You can ask the ladies in the kitchen,” the gray-haired man said as he led them to a large building behind the church. “But we have so many people come to us for help. Sometimes we give food to eight hundred men a day.”

  A heavy door revealed a large room with opaque windows and chipped linoleum. It smelled of stewed cabbage and body odor. Tables and a motley assortment of chairs had been set up, and most were filled with men, though plenty of women and children sat among them. James’s gaze fell on one, a too-thin toddler on her mother’s lap. Her long lashes and porcelain skin contrasted with the patched, stained little coat. She reached for a roll, but her mother kept it out of reach and broke the stiff bread into smaller pieces, giving her one at a time, either to keep her from choking or to stretch the meal out. The child stuffed each piece into her mouth and set to chewing with a determined motion of her tiny jaw. The girl’s father, hollow-eyed and with an expression one muscle short of a snarl, noticed James’s scrutiny and glared until the cop looked away.

  You’d let your son starve for your pride….

  Would he?

  The priest was leading them toward the kitchen. “We never know from one day to the next what we’re going to be given to work with. Many grocers will be generous with old bread and meats, but it’s awfully hard to get decent vegetables, especially in winter. Everything is harder in the winter. We keep the heating at a minimum to divert funds here, but on top of all that, we have more people to serve.”

  “Why?” Walter asked. “Because they can’t survive in the shanties in this cold?”

  “No, there’s just more of them. Once the lake freezes, the port closes for the winter and that ends a lot of jobs. On top of that, some of the mills and auto plants in Detroit closed down and those men came here. Is this about that poor woman they found in the alley?”

  “What do you think about a bas—a man like this, Father?” Walter surprised James by asking. “Is he controlled by the devil, or just a rotten man?”

  “I get asked variations of that question all the time, my son, and I’ve not yet found a perfect answer. I believe it’s a combination of both.”

  He introduced them to three ladies dressed in practical and similar garb, with no other characteristics in common: a teenage girl, dull and pockmarked; a woman of about thirty with a peaches-and-cream complexion; and a hatchet-faced matron. Not one recalled Flo Polillo.

  “Well, thanks anyway, ladies—” Walter began.

  James interrupted. “Father, what’s that?” He gestured to three large crates that someone had labeled with white paint: men’s, women’s, and CHILDREN’S.

  “This is where we put the available clothing. The ladies here dole it out as best they can based on size and need. It doesn’t last long.”

  Resting on top of the women’s pile sat a bright blue summer frock, too cool for this time of year and too frilly for everyday use. A rich girl must have cleaned out her closet.

  James pulled out a photo of the blue coat from the first victim. He explained—very briefly—why they were looking for the owner of the coat. The occupants of nearby tables paid no attention to them but continued to eat with solemn focus and little conversation.

  The priest said, “Even if it came here, these are only the odds and ends. Most of the clothing is given as direct relief, with shelter and food—over thirty-two thousand families last year. So I really can’t guess where your coats would have ended up.”

  “I understand, Father,” James said. But then the matronly one took the photo and said, with faint German overtones that raised the hair on the back of James’s neck, “Yah, I remember. We got two of them.”

  “Yeah?” James couldn’t believe their luck.

  “Goot inseams. Extra stitching at the cuff. Donated by Bailey’s.”

  “The department store,” James said. They had been able to find the origin from the tag. “You know your coats.”

  “I supervised the line at the shirtwaist factory until the crash.” She surveyed his frayed cuffs and worn buttons.

  “Did you see who took it?”

  The girl and the peaches-and-cream woman shook their heads, but the older one said, “I helped a gentleman into one of them. I don’t know what happened to the other.”

  “What man? What did he look like?”

  “Short for a man, and stocky. Dark hair. The color suited him. He seemed pleased when I told him so.”

  At least ten questions threatened to burst from James at once, so he made himself take a breath and pull out his notebook. Walter let him handle it, more interested in the visual examination of Miss Peaches and Cream.

  “What was his name?”

  She shrugged.

  “When was this?”

  “Early summer, I zuppose. Still cool at the night. I remember thinking he could use a light coat.”

  “Did he stay here at the church?”

  The priest answered that. “No, we don’t have anything like that. We help find houses for families, sometimes, but we don’t have the resources to provide both food and shelter.”

  “Ma’am, did this man tell you where he spent his nights? Or even his days?”

  “I don’t remember. I juzt happen to recall the coat, that’s all.”

  “Then did he say anything about the coat?” James asked in desperation.

  Her face cleared. “Yes, I remember now. He seemed quite pleased with it, like I said, and said perhaps it would help him get a job like he’d had before.”

  James refrained from grasping her arm. “What job?”

  “Oh, ich weiss nicht—I don’t know. Looking for work is all these men do, all day, every day. Poor souls.”

  A man at the closest table glanced up at them. His eyes blazed at the description before reality snuffed out the flame and he turned his face downward once again.

  “But what kind—”

  “Mechanic.” Apparently another wisp of memory had surfaced, and she massaged her chin with strong fingers as she thought. “That was it. Mechanical zupervisor—heavy machinery, steam engines, that’s what he zaid. He called them turbines.”

  James digested this. Walter tore his gaze from the younger woman long enough to question the woman further, but she could not add anything more.

  James and Walter thanked the quartet and went out into the freezing day once more.

  After the car warmed up and thawed out their jaws, Walter said, “This doesn’t quite fit. Unless this guy gave the hawk-nosed lady in there a line, he’s a reasonably pleasant, formerly hardworking joe. Why would he hang around with a punk like Edward Andrassy?”

  “Maybe
he didn’t. We found them together, but they weren’t killed together. The coroner said the guy with the coat was dead a week or two before Andrassy.”

  “And he went looking for a job. Great. That narrows it down to half the guys in this city. Probably more.”

  “But he’d have been looking for a mechanic job. Who’d be hiring for that?”

  Walter waited for a bundled-up family of four to cross the street in front of them, which allowed him to look like a nice guy while using the time to light a cigarette. He offered James one of the Luckies and for once James didn’t have the inclination, or willpower, to refuse. They puffed companionably before Walter said, “Garages. Factories, the few that still operate.”

  “Trains.”

  “You and your trains again! Ain’t it that guy you’re always quoting who says never theorize ahead of the facts?”

  “Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Yeah, the limey. You’re stuck on this railroad thing and now you see trains every way we turn. I thought you liked that masher doctor for it.”

  “Odessa. Who picks up his marks at the train station,” James said.

  “The dead whore don’t have nothing to do with trains,” Walter argued. “She had a place to stay and wasn’t leaving town.”

  “Same with Andrassy. And the woman had coal on her.”

  “The city runs on coal!”

  “I know, I know. But what else do we have to go on? Two guys found by the train tracks and four months later we still don’t even know who one of them is.”

  “And probably never will, by now. That’s why we should concentrate on Andrassy and this woman. It’s easier to trace their movements since people knew them.”

  “The whole city’s been working on Andrassy for four months, and every cop will be working on Flo Polillo now. Why duplicate efforts? I say we stick with the man in the blue coat.”

  “The captain said to track down the doctor the Polillo hag made payments to. Remember?”

  James finished the cigarette and cracked the window only enough to toss the butt out. Then he put his hands in his armpits to keep them warm. “Okay, you’re right. Let’s compromise.”

  “I hate it when you say that.”

  “We’ll go see Odessa. The mook claims to be a doctor, maybe he knows this Manzella. And we can also ask if he saw our guy in the blue coat while trolling the train station last summer.”

  “He won’t say even if he did,” Walter predicted. “That chizz has every angle figured.”

  CHAPTER 32

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10

  PRESENT DAY

  The body pieces found in the crates apparently belonged to a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two who worked the early-morning hours at the West Side Market, unloading, cleaning, and stacking fruit for display. Two other merchants remembered her being there about 5:00 A.M., but when her boss arrived at six he found the job only half done and no sign of Peggy Hall. The scattered personnel at the market probably would have seen her abductor if he had entered the pavilions, police concluded, but Peggy made several trips to the Dumpster to throw out empty boxes. She always flattened them properly and took them to the one marked for recyclables. Peggy Hall believed in being green. She must have encountered the killer in this dark corner of the lot, as the Cuyahoga quietly streamed by.

  “Interesting, that Dumpster,” Theresa said to Don as the DNA analyst prepared microtubes in order to confirm Peggy’s identity. “The milk crates he used didn’t come from it. I found—aside from another strand of that black nylon that keeps turning up—dried spaghetti with sauce, a healthy little clump of it.”

  “You can’t get spaghetti at the West Side Market?” Don asked. “Isn’t that against the order of nature or something? I thought you could get everything there.”

  “Oh, you can. But we didn’t see any in that Dumpster, or in any of the Dumpsters. I think he picked up the milk crates somewhere else. That makes more sense—he would have had all his props in place before choosing a victim. He would already have the crates.”

  “And this spaghetti?”

  “If he’s smart—and he is—he picked them out of the garbage somewhere, so they couldn’t be traced to him or his place of business.”

  “Aha. So you think he stole them from a Dumpster behind a restaurant that serves spaghetti?”

  “Yep.”

  “Wow. That narrows it down. In a city the size of Cleveland. Tess, everyone from Bob Evans to Hornblower’s serves spaghetti.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course you can take a sample and run it through our spaghetti sauce database.”

  “Not funny.” She rubbed her eyebrows. The few hours of sleep she had managed to catch at home had not helped.

  “If this were a TV show, we’d have one.”

  “If this were a TV show, I’d be twenty pounds lighter and twenty years younger. And Leo would be chosen People’s Sexiest Man Alive.”

  They spent the next thirty seconds giggling. Theresa’s laugh held a tinge of hysteria.

  “Seriously,” she said, wiping her eyes. “We ID’d Peggy Hall off a missing person report filed by her sister, who was sleeping over to watch the kids while Peggy worked. The husband has been in the hospital for two months after an accident at work—something to do with a forklift—and he called the sister to see why Peggy hadn’t come by for her daily visit on her way home from the market. She has no record. She was a perfectly nice woman, working her butt off to keep her family going.”

  “Wow,” Don said. “Sister’s going to be watching those kids for a very long time.”

  “We’ve got to catch this guy, and we’ve got to do it tonight.” Since the killer seemed to be an early riser, tonight’s victim had most likely already been abducted. Every police department in Cuyahoga County had been alerted to contact the Homicide unit with any missing person report filed today, particularly those of grown men, as well as reports filed in the prior forty-eight hours. The media had been pressed into service and fed warnings about possible abductions. County residents were warned to take extra precautions for their safety and to watch for any suspicious behavior occurring around them, especially during the hours from dusk to dawn. This could make their killer change his habits or go to ground, and catching him would be that much more difficult. But they couldn’t neglect the chance that for his next target, forewarned might prove to be forearmed. “Frank will put cops at each of the four corners of a square mile at Fifty-fifth and Kingsbury, plus one at the rapid station. And he should have a more difficult task tonight. The fifth victim of the real Torso killer was a young man—never identified, despite a boatload of tattoos—and they found a large pool of blood next to his body.”

  She got lost for a moment, picturing this, until Don prompted her. “Uh-huh?”

  “So he was one of the few victims actually killed at the scene. Most were killed somewhere else, cleaned, and then deposited. Our killer can’t just dump the victim. He has to bring him, murder him, decapitate him, wrap the head up in the pants, and carry it a thousand feet away. That’s going to be tough to do in an open valley surrounded by cops.” Impossible, she hoped, for the city’s sake as well as any future victims’. Councilman Greer, with his construction project cleared, had now guided the city’s fear into a hot wave of righteous indignation at police incompetence, mentioning her and Frank by name. Bad enough that he let his bruised ego come after her, but to criticize Frank because he couldn’t wave a magic mirror and spot the killer aroused Theresa’s own virulent indignation. Only catching the killer would stop Greer’s assault.

  Don said, “I see. This guy will show up with tonight’s sacrifice, and your cousin and half the Cleveland police force will be waiting for him.”

  “So will I.”

  Irene Schaffer sat in a wheelchair and stared out at the setting sun with a face so vacant that Theresa worried—perhaps Irene had good days and bad days, and this could be one of the latter. But when the old woman turned and saw her, the wrinkles in her fac
e curved into smiles along with her lips. “You came back.”

  “Yes. I have some more questions, I hope that’s okay.”

  “Let me check my busy social schedule. Sure, it’s okay.”

  Theresa waited patiently for the tea routine, trying not to tap her foot. Her mother would kill her if she was late to her own birthday party, and she’d even hear it from Frank, since his mother was to host the shindig. They would both have to make a showing before cutting out to wait at the valley. But she couldn’t rush Irene. Theresa might find herself in a place like this someday, with a visit from a stranger the only entertaining thing to happen that year.

  She began, “We talked about your encounter with Dr. Louis.”

  “I’ve been trying to remember more about him.” The old lady stirred her tea as delicately as any queen. “I came up with a white shirt with gold buttons. The buttons had an anchor on them.”

  “Really,” Theresa said, just to say something.

  “I got rather a close look at them. Does that help?”

  “They thought one of the victims might be a sailor, the one they called the Tattooed Man. But I’m here to focus on the room, the little storeroom he put you in. The building is going to be destroyed tomorrow, and it’s driving me crazy that we still can’t figure out which office the room with the body belonged to.”

  Irene tapped her spoon on the cup. “Dr. Louis had a door behind his desk, and that opened into the closet.”

  “I understand that, but the other offices probably had such built-in closets as well. The door behind his desk—was it next to the outer wall, or the inner wall, by the hallway?”

  For the first time Irene seemed unsure. “Neither…somewhere in the middle.”