by Lisa Black
“Tell me again about the arrangement of the room. When you first walked in from the hallway—”
“His desk was on the left,” Irene said immediately, “but not touching the wall. He had a chair behind it for him and two in front of it—”
“Closer to the hallway door.”
“Yeah. On the right were two windows and shelves going almost to the ceiling, with books and bottles and things. He had a coat rack in the far corner, way behind his desk. That was about it. Kind of sparse, really. That also struck me as odd—most doctors’ offices that I’ve ever seen, even today, are crammed to the gills with stuff.”
“So the desk sat about midcenter along the south wall?”
Her face scrunched up in concentration. “Yeah, I think that’s about right.”
“And the door to the storage room, in the south wall behind it—would you say that was closer to the outer wall, or the hallway wall?”
Irene thought so long that Theresa had to gasp out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“The outer one, I guess. Otherwise his desk would have been in the way of the door.”
“Okay. When you entered the room, the little storage room, did the space open up to the right or the left?”
“I see what you mean. God, I tried not to think about this for so many years—”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Okay. I woke up on the cot…. I pushed him and ran past the shelves…. I think the storage area would have stretched between the middle of the room and the outer wall. When you looked into it, it opened to the right. The cot lay in the back corner. I had to get past him, out the door, around the desk, and out the door to the hallway.”
Theresa pondered this with a mix of exhilaration and disappointment. The area in which they found James Miller lay farther into the building. If that section of floor had not belonged to Dr. Louis’s office, it moved Arthur Corliss up to number one suspect. Corliss, the adored father of her new friend Edward. Maybe—Odessa could have installed the table after Irene’s attack and before James’s murder. “And this was a cot, not a table?”
“A cot, canvas thing about two feet off the floor. Standard military issue, I learned a few years later.”
“Did you see any plumbing in there? A sink, a toilet?”
“I didn’t really stick around to inventory the place, dear. I only remember shelves, bare wooden things made out of two-by-fours. I grabbed on to one to haul myself up. It gave me a splinter.”
“What did he have on the shelves?”
“Not much, as I recall. Bottles and jars, like his outer office. A stack of paper and a typewriter, I remember that.”
“Any medical instruments? Like a stethoscope, or…knives?”
Irene grinned to show that the delicacy had been wasted on her. “To chop up his victims with? I don’t remember any, but again, I didn’t take the time to look around.”
“And then you ran out.”
“As fast as my chubby little legs could carry me.”
“And you saw no one else? All the other tenants had gone home?”
“Yes. Yes….” Irene sipped tea.
“You seem unsure about that,” Theresa said, pressing her.
“I didn’t see anyone. But—oh, that was it. The dog.”
“Dog?”
“The man in the next office must have had a dog. I heard him whining and scratching at the wall next to me, as if he heard us in there and knew I was in trouble. Animals can always tell, you know. They sense it. Or maybe he just wanted us to come and let him out.” She shook her head, the badly dyed locks going every which way. “Funny, I forgot all about that until now. Probably because when you asked I thought you meant humans.”
James Miller had made a notation about dog hair in his notes. “And you’re sure this dog was in the other office? Not in the hallway or outside the building?”
“No, the scratches were close, and on wood. Real clear.”
“Did he bark?”
“Yeah, once or twice. Obviously no one was there to hear him, except good old Dr. Louis—the bastard.”
“Why would someone leave a dog in an office overnight?”
“Honey.” Irene Schaffer’s eye twinkled over the rim of her teacup. “People didn’t have electric alarms that called the police when a burglar opened the door or smashed the window. And thieves were thick on the ground then. People were desperate.”
“I see. Irene, I’m going to try to get a blueprint of the building and bring it here to show you. Then we can make some notations about the layout.”
“Sure, bring it by. I’ll try to make time for you.”
“Thanks.” Theresa set her cup gently on the doily-clad end table. “I have to go now, or I’m going to be late to my own birthday party.”
“How old are you?”
Theresa made a face. “Forty.”
She expected the ninety-one-year-old Irene to point out that forty made her a mere child, but the woman said, “That sucks.”
“Yes, it does.” At the door, strangely reluctant to leave, Theresa turned back. “Say, you never told me about robbing the bank.”
Irene’s eyebrows pushed the wrinkles on her forehead up to her hairline. “I wouldn’t rob a bank, dear. I’ve never taken a thing that didn’t belong to me, no matter how tight things got.”
“But you said—”
“I said I knocked one over. That’s different.”
Theresa waited, returning the older woman’s grin.
“It was the Union National Bank Building on Euclid. They demolished it in the fifties to build a Woolworth’s. My boyfriend at the time—Harold something-or-other—worked for the demolition company and I got to sit with him in the cab as he swung the wrecking ball.”
“I see. You knocked it over.”
“That we did. Every time that wrecking ball smashed into the walls, the ground shook all the way up through the machine until my teeth rattled. My heart bounced around in my rib cage. It was something to feel, all right.”
“Cool.”
“Actually, after a while it got a little tedious. They didn’t go just bam, bam, bam. They had to stop after every swing and take a look at what they’d done and decide where the next blow needed to be. It all had to do with the weight of the upper floors and the placement of the supports. Harold knew all about that stuff and I wanted to know everything about Harold. Always date interesting men, dear. Life is too short to waste on boring people.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Theresa promised as she left.
CHAPTER 33
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
PRESENT DAY
One glance told Theresa that her aunts had won control of the cake. Had it been up to her cousins, they would have had it decorated with black icing and perhaps a vulture or two. But her cousins were no doubt busy with their own children and jobs and households and left it to the aunts, and the aunts had picked out a round white concoction with pink roses and yellow bumblebees. The fact that it would have been more appropriate for a preschooler made her feel not the slightest bit younger and certainly no less self-conscious about the entire celebration.
That would not, of course, stop her from eating as much of the frosting as she could get.
“Don’t stick your finger in that,” Frank warned.
“Too late.”
“It will make you fat.”
“Too late for that, too.”
“Are you guys going to kick out a death certificate on Kim Hammond soon?” he asked. “Her mother calls us every day about it. I keep referring her to you, but she calls us.”
Theresa let her aunt’s German shepherd lick the frosting residue from her finger. “Christine said she was having some kind of problem with it—not the cause of death, she’s going to keep that a generic ‘bodily trauma’ and then list ‘decapitation’ and ‘exsanguination’ as factors. But paperwork is holding it up. She’s still trying to get the medical records and birth certificate.
”
“Another reason why the mother needs to call you and not me.”
“Go ahead and tell her to.” Theresa paused to hug one of the many children of her many cousins, then turned back to Frank. “You getting anywhere on Kim?”
“No.”
“Not at all?”
He sipped red punch from a plastic cup, making a face she knew meant it would taste better with some rum in it. “Snaps to the girl for staying off the drugs and all, but it seems that all she did with her new free time was sit around her mother’s apartment and watch TV. As far as we can tell, she didn’t contact her old gang, didn’t return to her old haunts. She went downtown now and then, but what she did there is anyone’s guess. Probably just shopped. Her mother did say she’d go to the West Side Market once in a while.”
“Where Peggy Hall worked?”
“Yeah. But no one ever saw them together.”
Another cousin stopped by to hug Theresa. “Happy birthday.”
“Thanks.”
“So, you’re over the hill now, huh?”
“And speeding down the other side.” Theresa would have laughed at the comment from anyone other than Heather, the youngest and perkiest cousin, the daughter of the youngest and perkiest aunt. Heather’s butt probably wouldn’t fall until she drew social security no matter how many beautiful and perky children she pushed out.
“Well, you look great.”
“Thanks,” Theresa said. “But from now on I’ll only look great for my age.”
Frank frowned in confusion, because he was, of course, a man, and didn’t understand.
“It’s one of those lines you cross,” Theresa explained to him. “It starts when people start calling you ma’am instead of miss, as if a memo had been sent out to everyone in the world except you. Then in a few years you find your normal poundage has been shifted upward, and even if you lived on plain lettuce, your high school weight has become an impossibility. Then you find that you can walk past a group of young men without hearing any suggestive comments.”
“Depressing,” Heather said.
“Actually, that’s the only good part of aging I’ve found so far,” Theresa told her. “Sometimes I like being invisible.”
“That’s what Kim seemed to have been,” Frank said, giving the punch another try. “Invisible. If she went anywhere or did anything in the weeks before she died, we have yet to find out about it.”
“Then look at home. What about that creepy guy on her floor you told me about?”
Dead girls didn’t interest Heather, who interrupted with: “Is that hostage-negotiator guy still chasing you?”
Theresa leaned against the table to give the muscles in her butt some relief from the onslaught of gravity and considered this. Chris Cavanaugh called her rarely and inconsistently, which hardly constituted chasing. And yet nothing gave her the impression he had stopped calling. “I suppose.”
“Are you going to let him catch you?”
“Actually”—Theresa sipped and inwardly agreed that the punch did need some rum—“I’ve been seeing another man. Older. Distinguished.”
Behind Heather, Frank rolled his eyes.
“Likes trains,” Theresa went on.
Perky didn’t equal dumb. Heather apparently suspected a put-on and left to steer her toddler away from the punch bowl as he poised himself to fish for the floating lumps of sherbet. Theresa and Frank escaped for some fresh air.
The backyard of Frank’s mother’s house ended in trees, and Theresa watched the setting sun turn them into an inferno of reds and golds. Forty years old, and still the only person she wanted to talk to was her cousin. Maybe Leo and Irene Schaffer and everyone else was right. She had a gap in her life and needed someone to fill it.
She asked Frank, “Did you find out any more about James Miller’s work history?”
“Not much. Hired in 1929, made detective in ’32. His partner’s name was Walter McKenna. Human Resources did find a few reports relating to Miller’s disappearance; they were in with the paperwork to dismiss him from the rolls for apparent dereliction of duty. The partner had no idea what had happened to him. They had been working on the investigation of the third victim, the one killed in June 1936.”
“The Tattooed Man. The one who should die tonight. I mean, the murder our current killer should be planning to re-create tonight.”
“I know what you meant. Anyway, at the end of the day McKenna went home to dinner and they parted ways. He never saw Miller again. Miller’s wife said he never came home. End of report.”
“So he ran into the killer by coincidence, or he followed a lead he didn’t tell his wife or his partner about.”
“Or the partner’s lying,” Frank supposed.
“Why would he?”
“Cleveland was pretty wild then. Organized crime ran the city and most of the cops were helping them do it. That’s why they hired Ness, to clean up both the city and the department.”
Clouds were creeping up to block out parts of the sunset and she hoped it wouldn’t rain on tonight’s stakeout. “You think Miller worked for the mob and they killed him?”
“Or he didn’t, and dirty cops killed him.”
It surprised her that he would suggest such a thing, but then, it had happened a long time ago and it would hardly reflect on today’s police force. “You think so?”
“No, not really. I can’t see a cop cutting someone’s head off. The mob would at least have had a little more practice at it. Maybe they intended to plant the body in a way that would make everyone think the Torso killer did it, and lost their nerve or changed their minds. Or it really was the Torso killer. Who knows? If they couldn’t solve it in 1936 I doubt we can now.”
“Maybe we can. At least we’ve narrowed the suspects down to the tenants of that building,” she said, aware that she was echoing Brandon Jablonski’s earlier words.
They stood in silence for a few minutes, thinking. A V of geese flew above them, heading for the dusky southeast sky with a round of startlingly loud honks.
“Weird, isn’t it?”
Frank lit a cigarette. “What?”
“This case has fascinated Cleveland for three-quarters of a century. I just keep wondering what Grandpa would say if he knew we were working on it.”
Frank said nothing and puffed, staring at the trees. “We used to watch The Untouchables all the time,” she said. “When I got older and started reading true crime I’d tell him about every case I read. Most of them he already knew.”
“And I’m the one who became a cop,” Frank said.
His words settled through the air like a layer of dust, and suddenly she heard what he had been trying to say, possibly for years. He had been one of the boys in a sea of girls. He had listened to Grandpa’s tales and had gone into the same line of work. If anyone became their grandfather’s favorite, it should have been Frank. Not her.
Frank had spent as much time with him as Theresa had, at least before her father died. After that no one had been around Grandpa as much as she had, or rather, no one had been around Theresa as much as Grandpa.
It would never have occurred to her that Frank resented that relationship, never in a million years, but now it seemed so obvious that she felt stupid.
“But you had a father,” was all she could think of to say.
He ground the cigarette into the grass, twisting hard as if to make sure the embers were out. “Not much of one.”
That was true.
“Frank—”
He didn’t look at her. “Come on, let’s go in. You have presents to open so we can get out of here and back to the stakeout. I got you Scott Joplin CDs; sorry to ruin the surprise.”
“But, Frank—”
“It’s a boxed set. Better rip into them now.” The sun, beginning its nightly dip, turned his face to scarlet. “We’re going to have to go.”
CHAPTER 34
MONDAY, JANUARY 27
1936
James and Walter had to wait
until the following day to find the doctor in. To James’s frustration, they had neglected to get a home address for him during the Irene Schaffer investigation and he had no listing in the city directory. But Monday, despite the cold, found the building at 4950 Pullman full and bustling.
Odessa, of course, not only denied being Flo Polillo’s Dr. Manzella but denied knowing a Dr. Manzella. He showed no concern over the name, merely added a new bottle to the sparse collection on his shelves, moving the items already present so that there would be equal spacing among them all. “I don’t wish to be crude, gentlemen, but I don’t include common whores among my patients.”
“As opposed to uncommon ones?” Walter asked.
“She wasn’t a whore,” James said, though he knew this to be largely untrue. “She held a job, most of the time.”
Odessa said, “I’m not trying to be elitist, but you’ve seen the type of lady who leaves my office. If any of them needed to work they wouldn’t be able to afford my services. It’s a pity, really, for the lowest classes are the ones who need nutrition counseling the most of all. If we had a government that cared for all its citizens equally—”
“So you don’t know a Dr. Manzella?” James cut in.
“No.” The bottles arranged to his satisfaction, Odessa turned. “Never heard of him.”
“And you don’t have any drugged young girls in your closet?”
The man actually laughed at that. “No, Officer, I do not.”
“Mind if I check?”
“Jimmy…,” Walter said with a note of warning.
“Not at all.” Odessa gestured toward the closet door with a gracious sweep of his hand. “Though if you continue to make a habit of this, I will make a report of harassment to your superiors.”
Now Walter bristled. “Go right ahead, mister. Our superior has a daughter about Irene Smith’s age.”
James didn’t bother to correct the girl’s last name in light of Walter’s sudden support. He pulled the door open and entered the storage room, flicking a switch to illuminate the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. He didn’t really expect to find a girl. What he wanted to look for was blood.